


Assets Out of Containment

by follow_the_sun



Series: Team Stegosaurus vs. the Universe [2]
Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV), Captain America (Movies), Jurassic Park (Movies), Jurassic World (2015), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Brain Damage, Bromance, Bucky Barnes Gets a Hug, Bucky Barnes Needs a Hug, Canon-Typical Violence, Complete, Dinosaurs, Does Bucky Barnes Ever NOT Need a Hug?, Don't Touch Lola, Don't Try This At Home, Gen, Hydra (Marvel), Hydra is mean to dogs, Indominus Rex - Freeform, Memory Loss, Motorcycles, Panic Attacks, Past Brainwashing, Post-Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Punching Dinosaurs in the Face, Secret Underground Lairs, Swearing, Swearing at Velociraptors, Team Stegosaurus, Velociraptors, Volcanoes, implied medical torture, really really really dark humor, saber-toothed cats deserve to be in the movies too, violence against steering wheels
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-07-05
Updated: 2015-10-15
Packaged: 2018-04-07 17:56:24
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 24
Words: 59,037
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4272627
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/follow_the_sun/pseuds/follow_the_sun
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>After CA:TWS, Bucky Barnes suspects HYDRA is running a project in a little place called Jurassic World, and decides to go poke it with a stick.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Welcome to Jurassic World

**Author's Note:**

  * Translation into Français available: [Sujets Hors Confinement](https://archiveofourown.org/works/6256291) by [Nek0baba](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Nek0baba/pseuds/Nek0baba)



> Takes place between Avengers: Age of Ultron and Captain America: Civil War, between seasons 2 and 3 of Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., and before/during the events of Jurassic World.
> 
> Please also enjoy [this art](http://www.imgrum.net/media/1326617357975858580_3622345415) by Daiji, which I feel perfectly captures the spirit of this series! ^_^

Costa Rica sucks.

All right, all right, Isla Nublar isn’t technically part of Costa Rica. The story is that some rich bastard bought this island back in the early ‘90s, made dinosaurs on it, got eaten by the dinosaurs, left the island to a corporation that technically owns the place now and is filling it up with  _more_ dinosaurs. (No word on how Costa Rica feels about a multinational conglomerate hiring Americans to build fifty-foot murder machines off its coastline, by the way, although if his suspicions turn out to be right, they probably don’t have a choice about it.)

The point is, it’s tropical, which means  _hot,_ which is a problem when you rely on long sleeves and gloves to fit in with the standard-model humans. God knows he’s handled worse in the name of a mission, but he figures he’s sweated out about two of those $7.50 bottles of airport water by the time he stands in front of the arch of dinosaur bones that marks the hotel’s main gate.

The whole idea of dinosaurs, incidentally, should sound really stupid. But Barnes is a little different than the average Jurassic World tourist. Not just because _he_ should be extinct right now, too—would be as dead as the T. Rex skeleton they’ve rigged up in the airport, if things hadn’t gone seriously weird in the winter of 1943—but because when he was a kid, he believed in science the way other people believed in God. Becca volunteered at the church three times a week and Stevie (an honorary Barnes) had that insanely overdeveloped moral code that was the only big thing about him, but Bucky Barnes was the true believer in the family. He _knew_ that someday cars would fly, cities would be built on the moon, and sickly little punks like Stevie would take a pill that would fix their squeaky lungs and wobbly hearts once and for all. He might not ever be one of them, didn’t have the grades or the brains for college even if he’d had the money, but he had to believe there were people who could make a better future. The way he saw it, he couldn’t afford not to. 

What he got instead was a future where scientists squashed your memories into the corners of your skull so they could program in new orders and built city-sized flying submarines that could kill ten million people in a blink, but hey, at least they paused to get rid of polio before they jumped right into cloning extinct ancient nightmare monsters from mosquito guts, so, hey, go science.

Barnes gets distracted easily these days. He’s been standing in one place for long enough, thinking about all of this, that in retrospect, it’s inevitable that some kid was going to crash into him. He’s had enough practice controlling his reactions now that the kid is in no immediate danger—the fingers of his twitchy left hand close into a fist in his pocket instead of reaching out to grab and throttle—but the pressure of the small body colliding with his, and the chirp of “Sorry, Mister!”, bring him back to the present.

_Pull it together, Barnes. You got a job to do._

As soon as he thinks it, his eyes do a quick scan and he spots two security cameras, one on the underside of a shop awning and one on a post over the tram stop. Obvious as hell, which is the point, but there might be a second layer of security that’s less obvious, and there’s no way to guess what kind of facial recognition software they’re running. It’s possible he’s already been marked, in which case he’ll find out soon enough, but he’s betting they don’t waste the computing cycles unless they have reason to get suspicious. So, he needs to not give them one. He shoulders his bag and makes with the wide-eyed sightseer act as he moves toward the hotel.

Tourist traps, they call places like these. Ex-HYDRA-asset traps, too, if he’s not damned careful. He focuses on making just enough eye contact with the desk agent to seem normal, saying the same rote crap the other tourists say about how he can’t wait to see that one dinosaur that eats the shark and his favorite dinosaur is the T. Rex, has been since he was a kid. (That’s a lie; he secretly prefers the stegosaurus. Armor plates on its back and killer spikes on its tail: come on, that’s pretty badass for an herbivore. But that’s a potentially memorable sentiment, so he keeps it to himself.)

The credit card, one of a dozen he swiped while D.C. was on fire and nobody was watching the HYDRA safe houses, goes through without a hitch; he’s been expecting it to die any second for months now, but apparently the CIA’s still too busy flushing out the bad guys to send a fraud report to Citibank. The desk clerk barely even glances at the driver’s license, which calls him David H. Mitchell of Canton, Ohio. When she hands him his room keys and tells him to have a nice stay before turning back to her cell phone, he allows himself a little spike of satisfaction. Phase 1, insertion, successful. Begin phase 2: gather intel.

The asset, the Soldier, had one protocol only: insert, eliminate, extract. The only autonomy he got was in the split-second decisions, and sometimes they’d even punish him if they didn’t like his choices about that. (The clusterfuck with the SHIELD boss on the highway, for instance. He was plan H at that point, not supposed to break cover unless everybody else failed, and the part they got upset about was a guy in full face coverage ending up on Youtube?) They never involved him in planning, and it was rare that he ran deep cover missions at all. What he’s using here is knowledge he pieced together himself, from fragmented memories of what was going on around him over the years, stuff he was never intended to need or know. Steve would probably have a good line about that, about evil sowing the seeds of its own destruction or something—

_No. Think about Rogers on your own time. You know, when you’re not trying to prevent HYDRA from getting its hands on a pack of trained murdersauruses, dumbass._

Murdersaurus. That’s actually pretty good. He’ll have to remember it, he thinks, as he heads toward the elevator.

The rooms in this place come in Premiere, Luxury, and Platinum, which means stupidly expensive, absurdly expensive, and Tony Stark-on-payday-would-consider-this-excessive-for-a-theme-park. The cheapest floor in Premiere is full of tired, snippy parents and squealing, overstimulated kids, but when he shuts the door, the noise in the hall cuts off abruptly. He closes the curtains. He sweeps for bugs, thoroughly. He boots up his laptop and runs a software program to hide him from the wifi network, but even so, he makes sure to visit a few innocuous sites—a map of the park, “The Top 12 Things You Can’t Miss on your Visit to Jurassic World”—before he checks on the two Google alerts he’s got set up: “Steve Rogers” and “Captain America.”

When nothing particularly new or interesting comes up under either, he feels a little bit of tension leave his right shoulder and spine. He shuts the laptop, tosses his sweat-soaked clothes on the bed, and walks into the bathroom to take a shower.

In the safety of the steam, Barnes finally lets himself go. Images of Steve on the helicarrier swim up behind his eyes, and he leans his left arm against the wall and puts his face under the spray. He’s hauled that heavy arm around for months, dealing with the constant drag on his shoulder, with the slight overbalance that’s murder on his spine, with its freezes and malfunctions and increasingly frequent need for the wrenching motion that makes its servos stabilize. The least it can do is hold him up, for a change.

On some level, Barnes knows that “don’t think about it” is advice that has worked over the long term for exactly no one ever. It’s a short-term coping mechanism, at best. But Barnes has seventy years of crap in his head to deal with, and Steve… Steve would try, but his thinking is so black and white. His Bucky was a good guy, and then his Bucky was a helpless tool in the hands of the bad guys, so now that he’s free, Bucky is a good guy again, full stop.

Barnes agrees completely with the second premise. The other two are… complicated. 

He knows Rogers has been looking for him since he pulled his disappearing act in DC. Sam Wilson (and what is he, anyway? Rogers’ friend? Partner? New and improved Bucky?), a surprisingly resourceful guy, has gotten closer than he should’ve twice now, and it took all the tricks Barnes had to throw the guy off his trail. He also knows it’s pointless to try to stop himself from checking up on Rogers (last seen being a _complete frigging idiot_ in Sokovia, a place Barnes wouldn’t’ve gone back to if you paid him even before it got demolished by killer robots). He knows that in a few months, a year at the outside, he’ll have to go home and deal with his unfinished business. But he needs to figure out who he is now, and for that he needs distance, and quiet in his brain. And whether or not he was at fault for what he’s done, he already knows this new self can’t really move forward until he’s figured out some kind of atonement.   

Will this be it? He isn’t sure. Hell, he isn’t even sure yet that there _is_ a mission here. Almost all he has to go on is a specific memory of two midlevel HYDRA grunts talking in his presence right after the last time they pulled him out of cryo. One of the grunts looked at Barnes and said snidely, “They get the new assets down in Costa Rica on the job and this guy’s the one who’ll look like a dinosaur,” before the grunts’ mission commander snapped at them to secure the bullshit. It’s not just the words; it’s the commander’s tone that Barnes still can’t quite shake out of his head, the one that means _listen, soldier, you are_ literally _about to get all of us murdered._

Loose lips sink ships, all right.

Several times, while he was planning this mission, Barnes almost threw in the towel and sent an anonymous tip to Stark instead. No way a guy who builds flying robots as a hobby is going to be able to resist “HYDRA wants to weaponize dinosaurs,” and it’d probably take him two hours to bring the full wrath of the Avengers crashing down on Isla Nublar. But there is another reason Barnes ultimately decided to get a boots-on-the-ground look at the situation before he lets anyone else in on it.

The reason is simply this: He can explain the choices he made during the war and the lack of choices afterward, the brainwashing, the assassinations, the moment of weakness that made him abandon Steve on the riverbank and the realization of how screwed up he is that keeps him on the run from Steve over a year later…

But James Buchanan Barnes could never look himself in the mirror again if he passed up a chance to fight a Nazi dinosaur.


	2. Belinda

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Oh, wow, thanks for the comments and kudos! I'm still really new to actually letting people SEE my fanfic, so the encouragement means a lot to me.
> 
> Things will get more serious for Our Hero pretty soon, but first, a bit of baby dinosaur fluff, for reasons.

Before he booked tickets to the island, Barnes spent countless hours planning Mission Phase 2, not just with the flashy website that details the park now but with surveys, building plans, and scavenged data on the original abandoned park site. If HYDRA is operating on Isla Nublar, he’s pretty sure knows where he’ll find them. Now he just has to get there.

The whole top quadrant of the island, where the original park was built in the early ‘90s, is all restricted zone. Allegedly, nobody has been in there since the wall went up during “site reclamation” in 2002. InGen’s party line is that they don’t want to remind anyone of the 1993 incident (which is a nice way of saying “dinosaur murderfest” in the same way “asset” is a nice way of saying “brainwashed cyborg killer”), but Barnes smells a rat. Only a handful of people even saw the original site in operation, and most of them are dead. They still could have used the infrastructure that was originally put in on the north end of the island for the ferry landing and monorail. Instead, InGen routes all incoming visitors to the southern tip of the island, a longer trip that burns a third again as much fuel as the shorter approach and drops them off miles from the real park entrance. If you’re a massive corporation so intent on squeezing money out of tourists that you charge them $8 for a soft drink in a collectible plastic dinosaur cup (and no, he’s _not_ getting over drink prices in the modern era any time soon), you don’t route them out of their way by sea and then monorail them back again unless you’re hiding something more than a handful of bad memories.

If you’re HYDRA, on the other hand, then you love nothing more than building creepy secret bases in ominous forests. He’s been deployed from enough of them to know.

Barnes’ plans for his first day in Jurassic World are simple. He needs to find the fastest route into the old park, preferably one that doesn’t involve disabling an entire electric grid. He intends to run recon on the gyrospheres, whatever the hell they are, and the kayak tour. One of those should get him reasonably close to the restricted zone without attracting attention. If he finds a chatty staffer and asks the right questions, he might be able to identify the tracking devices he’s sure they have on all the vehicles. From there, he’ll head back to the hotel, leaving plenty of time to prep for real action after the park attractions close for the night.

But no plan survives first contact with the enemy, and right now, the enemy is a baby triceratops that’s trying to eat his wallet.

He stopped for a minute to watch the crowd of people flowing by on their way to something called a mosasaur feeding. Just for a minute, to deal with the sudden panic that comes on sometimes when he’s in a crowd of slow-moving, fragile civilians who press in on his personal space. He’s learned that once in a while, he can head it off by focusing on a good thing from his past, and today, he’s decided that good thing is going to be Coney Island. Not as sleek and flashy as this place, but a boardwalk’s a boardwalk, packed with people streaming past on their way to God knows where, kids constantly escaping from parental control and veering off in all directions, one poor teenager in the standard park uniform of polo and khakis whose job is apparently to stand on the base of a dinosaur statue and yell that the mosasaur feeding is this way, _this_ way, people, starting in fifteen minutes.

 _We’ve got the show if you’ve got the dime,_ he thinks, and an almost physical urge hits him to turn to his right and lean down to ask Steve if he wants to see this. It’s just a flash of old instinct, and then it’s gone. But before he can decide if this is a good thing or a bad thing, he feels something else: a tug on the back of his tourist-looking cargo shorts and all the fake identification he has in the world, his key to everywhere he needs to go and everything he needs to do, sliding out of his back pocket.

“Hey. Hey! Hey, guy, no.” Barnes jerks away from the fence he’s been leaning against and makes a grab for the wallet, now slick with reptile drool. He didn’t realize reptiles could drool, but this one does, and with a vengeance. He curls his fingers around the leather, tugs, and almost gets it back, but the little triceratops—which is little only by comparison to the adults, and has more muscle mass than a Saint Bernard—senses a game and tugs harder. “Hey. Dude. Give it back.”

“She’s a girl, actually,” says a voice by his side, and a hand reaches for the wallet and pops it out of the animal’s mouth with a practiced twist. Barnes looks up and sees one of the park staff inside the petting paddock: female, late teens, wearing the same park uniform as the yelling kid. Her nametag says _Hi, my name is ALISHA! I’m here to help._ “All the animals in the park are female. Here,” she says, handing him the wallet, now tooth-marked and slightly damp.

“Thanks.”

“No problem. She had you at a disadvantage.” Alisha’s eyes flick to his left arm, and Barnes tries not to flinch. It’s another scorching hot day, and being the only guy in the park wearing long sleeves has the potential to attract the notice of park security. His solution was to cover the metal in bandages and one of the gloves he brought for heavy work, then settle the arm in a shoulder sling. He knows people’s eyes tend to slide right past a disability; he remembers clearly how much Steve _hated_ that quick look-and-look-away that people did to him throughout his childhood. Experiencing it for the first time himself, Barnes isn’t exactly thrilled either, but pity is better than fear, so he’ll live with it.

But Alisha only lets her eyes linger on the sling for a second—a second that he only notices because he’s been trained to spot distraction, a tactical advantage—and then, to her credit, she’s back on task. “And I get lots of practice getting her to let go of things, because dis wittle wady is always hungwy, isn’t she, baby,” she says, addressing the… animal… directly.

“What do you call a baby dinosaur?” he asks, before he remembers that he needs to minimize contact with civilians. “Like a chick, or what?”

“Chick? Really?” She gives a little snort. “We call them hatchlings until they’re out of the lab. Then they’re either juveniles or calves. This one is technically Specimen TC-8102, but in here we call her Belinda.”

“Sorry,” Barnes says quickly. “I didn’t mean because they’re—I thought it might be like birds. They… came from birds or evolved into birds or something, right?”

Alisha’s answering smile is warm and genuine, so at least he’s redeemed himself from sexist jerk to confused but well-meaning tourist. “Not the triceratops specifically, but some of the others are related to modern birds. You can see it pretty well on the Gallimimus, there. Ask the tour guide about it when you go through the Creation Lab. They’re the experts on this stuff.”

“Wasn’t planning on doing the lab tour.”

“Oh, you really should. If you like these guys, you’ll love the hatchlings. Hey, since she already slimed you, put your hand under here and scratch.” She points to the animal’s chin. “She loves that.”

Barnes, not wanting to invite further disaster but also not seeing a reasonable way to extract himself, leans over the fence and obediently scratches. The dinosaur’s skin is thick, almost rubbery, less scaly and unpleasant than he expected. And the calf does seem to like the treatment; she leans into the scratch and and, when he starts to pull away, bops his hand with her nose. He lets himself smile, and pats the side of her snout before stepping back from the fence.

“Cute. Weird, but cute.”

Alisha nods. “They get as tame as dogs in here. There’s a rumor they’re going to have a trained dinosaur show someday. Jumping through hoops, just like the circus.”

Her tone is light, but there’s some venom behind that last part. Barnes says, “You don’t like the circus?”

“I don’t—” She stops herself abruptly, as if she’s just remembering where she works. “I think there’s a difference between people getting up close to animals so they can learn to appreciate them, and animals being treated like a spectacle. And I know there are jobs you _need_ animals to do—my brother’s a cop and a bomb-sniffing dog saved his life once—but some of the things…”

Barnes leans forward, right hand back on the fence. Belinda takes advantage of his carelessness to bop his hand again, then lick him, with a tongue like wet sandpaper. He almost doesn’t notice. His instincts are pinging, telling him, _She knows something, if you can get it out of her._ “If you could train a dinosaur,” he says, as if the idea is just occurring to him, “the things you could make it do… That could be pretty terrifying, to be honest.”

Alisha hovers on the verge of speaking for another moment, then lets out an intentionally dismissive laugh. “Well, I guess I shouldn’t worry about it unless it actually works, right? So far, nobody’s had any luck getting the herbivores to do anything more complicated than come when the food bell rings. Brains the size of walnuts, right, Lindy?” She scratches Belinda behind a knobby protrusion on the side of her head that Barnes guesses might be an ear. “Hey, are there any other calves you want to see up close?”

Disappointed but not surprised that he didn’t get anything of substance out of that, Barnes tilts his head at the sign beside the gate and says, “I think I’m a little over the height limit.”

“Oh, that’s no problem. I can bring them over to the fence. It’s not like I’m busy, everybody’s at the mosasaur show right now anyway.”

Alisha’s eyes flick to his left arm again, then back to his face, and Barnes has a sudden revelation: she’s being _kind_. The realization makes him slightly dizzy. The civilians he’s interacted with since D.C. have by and large been either cool or outright hostile; he kept his distance and, whether it was because they twigged to something strange in his behavior or just didn’t care, almost all of them have either maintained or widened that distance. How long has it been since he met someone who actually went out of their way to be nice to him on purpose, one person to another?

Steve never wanted people to treat him differently because of his laundry list of health problems; in fact, Barnes pulled him out of more than one fight he got into over exactly that. But Barnes is starved for kindness, and whatever prompted it, this sudden gift is like water in the desert. He’ll take it.

…And actually, there is a dinosaur he wants to meet. He looks at Alisha and feels his face break into a wide, unexpected grin. “Yeah,” he says. “Can you get me the baby stegosaurus?”

 

He stays at the petting paddock for better than thirty-five minutes, during which Alisha learns very little about him—because he hasn’t completely lost his mind—but he learns that Alisha is working here on an internship, part of her plan to become a paleozoologist; that yes, dinosaur zookeeper is an actual career, and one that’s in demand, actually; that baby dinosaurs love alfalfa, for whatever reason, just like rabbits, and will eat it off the flat palm of your extended right hand like a horse; and that the stegosaurus is _definitely_ the coolest dinosaur, bar none.

It’s not just the stegosaurus, or even the novelty of interacting with an animal for the first time in decades, that keeps him at the paddock long after he ought to be on his way. It’s also the first time since at least 1944 that Barnes has had the luxury to stand in the sun, talking to a pretty girl, even if it’s one who’s about 78 years too young for him. It feels… good. It feels _normal._ Well, as normal as anything is going to feel on a day that starts off with an extinct animal headbutting you and trying to eat your fake I.D. But it’s still shaping up to be the best day James Buchanan Barnes has had in a very, very long time.

So maybe it’s a forgivable lapse that he never notices the woman at the patio table across the street, silent and motionless, an untouched daiquiri melting into pink slush in front of her as she stares out from behind dark glasses, watching him.


	3. Restricted Zone

Buoyed by his encounter at the petting zoo, Barnes moves on to the next items on his agenda: the gyroscopes and the kayak tour. Neither is great, but at least one is reasonably successful.

The gyroscopes are an immediate bust. They turn out to use a lot of complicated InGen proprietary tech, which means 1) unfamiliar, 2) eminently trackable, and 3) full of chips and wires that might FUBAR the whole machine if he tries to disable any of the security. Also, he notices the reinforced doors on the building when he goes in. He should have realized earlier that equipment this expensive will be locked up tight after dusk, and his chance of getting one out undetected is slim to none.

He gets in line for the ride anyway, because it looks fun, which it probably would be if riders without a partner didn’t get paired up randomly so no cars go out half-empty. His fellow passenger is a thirteen-year-old self-proclaimed dinosaur expert named Scott, who doesn’t shut up for the entire tour and starts all his sentences with _“Actually,”_ as if Barnes had already put his idiocy about all things prehistoric on display. Barnes considers the fact that he doesn’t throttle Scott to be proof positive that he’s now officially one of the good guys.

It’s not a total loss of ninety minutes. He manages to get the kid on the subject of the old park, and naturally, the kid is an expert on all the dinosaurs InGen is rumored to have created but scrapped after the failure of the original park. He speculates at length about each species’ size, color, and relative badass-ness of claws and teeth, and he briefly touches on the rumor that the dinosaurs are still thriving and breeding in the restricted zone despite InGen’s insistence that this is physically impossible. It’s good intel. Barnes doesn’t necessarily expect to run across any surviving dinosaurs in the old park, but he once lost a strike team member to a panther during a jungle recon, and the suddenness and thoroughness of the attack left him with an unease about what might be hiding in the underbrush that persisted through half a dozen memory wipes in the Chair. He’s not interested in finding out what kind of nightmares you get if you piss off a feral dilophosaurus.

The kayak tour—oh, excuse him, the Cretaceous Cruise—is hard in a different way. The college kid working the booth ( _Hi, my name is KEITH! I’m here to help)_ is friendly and informative right up until Barnes makes it clear that, no, he’s not asking for someone else, he actually wants to book a spot for himself on the afternoon tour. The kid  looks at him, looks at his arm with its camouflage of bandages, and invokes the supreme power of a sign that says, **Guests must be physically fit enough to navigate the river. We reserve the right to refuse entry at our discretion.** Barnes points out to the kid that they make a paddle you can use with one arm, and also that a park like this, which is a prime Make-a-Wish destination among other things, should surely be equipped to handle everybody, but the kid is adamant: no exceptions, no appeal. Barnes briefly considers giving Keith a rousing and educational speech about ableism, the ADA, and the specific disappointed look Captain America would give him if he was here, but that would definitely make him memorable, so he chokes it down and contents himself with muttering “Поцелу́й мою́ жо́пу” under his breath as he walks away.

But before he does, he observes that the kayaks are stored overnight in racks on the beach, secured with steel cables that are barely heavier than bike locks. He also notes a shed marked EQUIPMENT fifty feet from the launch point.

 _Okay,_ he thinks, _now we’re cooking with gas_.

Resisting the temptation to swing by the petting paddock again, he heads back to what the Park quaintly calls Main Street, although it looks nothing like any Main Street Barnes has ever seen. One of his HYDRA credit cards, unharmed by its narrow escape from a triceratops gullet, buys him a nice dinner, because he’s finally figured out the trick to enjoying a meal here: instead of calculating how many weeks the price of one theme park dinner would’ve fed a family of five in 1939, he thinks of it as taking back a very small portion of what HYDRA owes him in 75 years of back pay. It works like a charm. The steak is rare, the potatoes are perfect, and the beer, even though it technically doesn’t affect him anymore, tastes exactly like freedom. When all of this is over—assuming all of this ever _is_ over, whatever _this_ even is—he is damn well going to bring a six-pack of this stuff to Steve’s apartment, and the two of them are going to drink it on the fire escape.

A dark-haired woman in tinted glasses sits in a booth with a clear sight line to Barnes, orders a salad, and watches him pay the bill and overtip the waiter. She doesn’t follow him when he leaves.

Barnes wanders the park for another hour, briefly entering a shop to buy an oversized black hoodie with the Jurassic World logo on it and a couple of postcards. He briefly debates mailing one to Steve c/o Avengers Tower, just to be a dick: _Wish you were here, you’d fit right in with the other dinosaurs, sincerely yours, JBB._ But he decides against it and heads back to the hotel, where he exploits his most useful skill from the Howling Commandos days: he can fall asleep just about anywhere, any time, and wake up refreshed and ready for action.

At 3:17 A.M., after the most persistent drunk tourists have stumbled back to their hotels and the park is officially closed, Barnes slips out of the hotel through the deserted kitchen, wearing the black hoodie over his HYDRA-issued tactical vest, black cargo pants that conceal a _lot_ of knives, and thick-soled boots. He hasn’t replaced the face mask, because he kind of maybe has some issues about things that look like muzzles lately, but he’s got a pair of military-grade StarkTek night-vision goggles that minimize the infrared color distortion. He’d like to have more guns. He only risked smuggling in two SIG Sauers, because airlines frown on that kind of thing. They’re fine, but he misses the kitted-out M4 he lost on the helicarrier. That was a beautiful gun.

He skirts the central area of the park and follows the path to the aviary, sticking to the shadows and avoiding security cameras, which show up as bright blue spots in the goggles. Shadows swoop and glide inside the aviary’s massive glass dome. A maintenance path cuts across to the kayak launch. Equipment sheds rarely disappoint him, and this one is no exception; the lock is absurdly easy to pop and it’s like they deliberately pointed him toward the bolt cutters. Once he’s cut the chain securing the kayaks, he chooses a red fiberglass model, mutters, “Suck it, Keith,” and hoists it onto his reinforced left shoulder to carry it to the launch.

As soon as he’s on the water, he knows this is the way to see Jurassic World. It’s pretty in the wilder, more jungle-y part of the island, peaceful. Insects, or maybe tree frogs, are chirping just enough so it’s not creepy-quiet, but there’s a general hush over the place. And there are brachiosaurs sleeping along the riverbank. Sleeping dinosaurs, just plopped down by the water, flanks going up and down with whooshing saurian breaths. No predators out here, and no idea at all that they’re eleventy-million years outside their time period. He kind of envies them. There are calves out here, too! Bigger than the ones in the petting paddock, but still visibly young dinosaurs with their necks draped over older dinosaurs’ backs, and over there, three of them sleeping tangled up in a pile, like puppies. Man, if he wasn’t pretty sure this place was rotten with HYDRA scum trying to turn innocent reptiles into evil scaly weapons of destruction, he’d definitely recommend it.

Sadly, all good things come to an end. Since he’s using the metal arm to paddle, the trip to the northernmost bend of the river is over in what feels like a blink, and he grudgingly pulls the boat up onshore and hikes into a far less pleasant jungle, with no trail, tangling vines, and—urgh—biting insects. It’s obviously deliberately designed to keep the tourists from ever getting near the massive concrete wall, which is topped with what looks like electrified barbed wire. Once he climbs up there, though, he figures out how to switch off a whole section of it with hardly any trouble.

 _Hey, HYDRA, it’s almost like you_ want _me to come in and mess up your shit._

He drops to the ground on the other side of the fence, gets his bearings, and starts hiking toward where the ruins of the old park should be. If HYDRA’s been stupid, they’ll have cleared an area around one of the old buildings, established their base either in it or under it, because they do love their theoretically Avengers-proof bunkers. If HYDRA’s been smart, it’ll take him longer to find the access point. Either way, he’ll scout it tonight, assess, decide whether to get some photos and send that anonymous tip to Stark or just take the place down himself—

And there’s a dinosaur in front of him.

This creature couldn’t be more unlike the sleepy brachiosaurs on the riverbank, not with that unmistakable gleam of intelligence in its eyes. Its head pokes up out of a thick patch of foliage, maybe four feet above the ground, on a neck that looks like it could strike as fast as a snake. It’s mottled green and gray in the scope of the goggles, and its front legs end in long curved talons. Its mouth is just slightly open, and its teeth are eerily like an alligator’s.

Score one for Scott, because the word that pops into his head is _velociraptor,_ and Scott’s assessment is absolutely correct: this is one terrifying motherfucker.

Moving slowly, steadily, Barnes reaches both hands down for the SIGs in their holsters. He keeps his body tensed, but he’s projecting readiness, not fear. The thoughtful, questioning part of his brain has slid into the background. The part that comes to the forefront is the fighter, the hunter, emissary of a species that invented fire and spears and grenade launchers and is not about to take any shit from a goddamn lizard. These moments, when shit is about to go down—he can’t say he likes them, exactly, but this is what other soldiers call _the zone._ Time seems to stretch, and his brain registers the blink of that reptilian third eyelid, the twitch of a thigh muscle as it tenses to spring, the swish of grass and the crack of tree bark under claws, even the weird, dry, snaky smell that wafts at him over the mud. The surge of adrenaline that runs through his serum-enhanced body is almost ethereal.

Then he snaps his arms up and fires both guns at the raptors springing at him from either side, because Barnes has seen this trick before and he is not stupid. The raptor to his right goes down, screeching frantically, with a bullet in its throat; the one to the left is knocked back by the first shot in the chest, felled by the second that blows the top off its brain. Barnes pivots on his right foot and the momentum of the bait raptor carries it past him, but damned if the thing doesn’t somehow twist in midair and come down with its jaws scraping the metal arm. He raises his right hand and punches it hard between the eyes with the butt of the pistol, and as it opens its jaws to bite down again, he puts one, two, three bullets in its chest.

It’s moving too fast for perfect accuracy, but he’s sure he’s hit something vital. And yet, Bait Raptor keeps coming and now Right Raptor is back on its feet, with a grating screech ripping out of its punctured throat. Barnes bodyslams it back while he drops the SIG from his right hand, whips out a knife, flips it and snatches it out of the air at the perfect angle, and God bless the Gerber Mark II, its black blade goes cleanly into Bait Raptor’s yellow eye. Bait Raptor is twitching but down, and now the metal arm is locked around Right Raptor’s throat and he lets the fingers do what they were built for. The whirr and clench as they lock into place is music; he’s holding the raptor three inches off the ground and it’s trying to kick with its back claws, and it does land a pretty good slash across his shin, but he registers the pain as something remote, a minor inconvenience to deal with later, and there it is, the most beautiful sound on earth: the metal crushes Right Raptor’s windpipe and he hears the rattle of death in its lungs as he flings it away into the underbrush.

There’s a moment of perfect, utter silence in Barnes’ head, and then the sound comes back all at once: his breath coming in short bursts, blood pounding in his ears, Left Raptor’s tail smacking the ground in some kind of weird reptile death throes. Well, if HYDRA’s out here, the stealth approach is already blown. He walks over to Left Raptor, leans down, and puts a bullet cleanly through its eye.

The SIG takes care of whatever brain it has left, and he repeats the process for Right Raptor and Bait Raptor before the nerves in his leg wake up and start demanding attention. Limping, he makes his way to a sturdy tree and puts his back against it, hiking up his pants leg to take a look. Through the goggles, his blood is a purplish-black. He reaches into the mid-thigh pocket of the cargo pants for a pressure bandage, which he applies quickly and efficiently. Shit, it’s going to need cleaned out and sewn up, which is a bitch to do a) on yourself when b) normal painkillers hardly have any effect on you. Then again, it’s a lot better than getting eaten by a velociraptor, so.

He tests the leg, and it’s okay to walk on for now. Okay. So there’s still a mission to do, and it doesn’t seem like anyone’s coming after him; five minutes after the sudden burst of gunfire, the sounds of the jungle are starting to come back, and his enhanced hearing doesn’t pick up any shouts, vehicles, or radio crackles. He is going to want both guns, though, and one of his SIGs went flying off… that way? He sweeps his eyes over the ground until he spots the black grip under a low bush and leans down to pick it up.

That’s when something drops out of the tree above him, lands on his back, and wraps an elbow around his throat. 

 

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Disclaimer: I don't know Russian, or anything about guns (my Google search history got a LOT more interesting during this chapter), so if anyone's an actual expert, feel free to let me know if I've made any super-obvious mistakes.
> 
> Also, the raptors in this chapter are unrelated to the Raptor Squad. Because I'm not a MONSTER.


	4. Name, Rank, Serial

The arm compressing Barnes’ windpipe is strong and the leverage is absolutely perfect. Other than the fact that it’s his own personal throat on the line, he can almost admire the technique. But before he can move to break the hold, a hypodermic needle punches into his right shoulder, and that changes everything.

 _Stupid, stupid, stupid, Barnes!_ HYDRA is onto him after all. They let him wear himself out on the velociraptors and now, now they’re trying to bring him in. They’re trying to drug him, and catch him, and put him back in the Chair.

Something inside Barnes goes cold, and a screech of grinding metal fills his brain. He closes his eyes, and the Asset opens them.

The Asset isn’t tired, and the Asset isn’t afraid. The Asset is _pissed_. The mission target on the helicarrier downed him briefly with a chokehold like this, but the mission target was 6’2” and 220 pounds of genetically enhanced muscle, and the aggressor who just dropped out of the tree on him is neither. The Asset’s metal arm reaches up, clenches its fingers around a Kevlar-armored shoulder, and throws the other body off his, slamming the aggressor’s spine against the ground. In the same move, he rolls back to his feet and punches, triggering the mechanically enhanced blow that will make the metal fist shatter concrete. Only the aggressor has also rolled out of the way and is back on her feet. Somewhere in there, she grabbed his remaining SIG from its holster, and now she’s facing him with her arms up, in a wide martial arts stance.

Barnes has a deep aversion to fighting women, regardless of how many times Peggy Carter demonstrated her ability to knock his ass into the dirt. The Asset, on the other hand, just recalibrates his tactics for a smaller target. He launches himself at the aggressor in a flurry of blows. He spins to kick, and his boot connects with her thigh, hard. The kick earns him a grunt, but she blocks the punch he follows it with, then twists with her arm, catching his hand. She’s trying to flip him, but he breaks the hold and shoves her back, viciously. He expects her to fall, but she fakes, goes for another gun in a thigh holster. He kicks her hand, almost gets the gun—

_Almost?_

—but takes a blast to the midsection, which the tactical vest absorbs. It’s not a bullet; it’s some kind of energy weapon, because HYDRA does love a weird ray gun. On his next try, he knocks it away, but she uses the same heel pivot he did earlier to pull her body out of the line of impact. She fights in silence, just like he does—by the time professionals like the two of them are throwing down, words are irrelevant—but the only possible interpretation of the look she gives him is, “Bitch _, please.”_

He comes at her again, a lunge that almost clips her as she falls back and blocks, then a strike that skims past her shoulder, and now it’s clear that the Asset’s body is malfunctioning. The left arm is mostly unaffected, but the right arm is slow and clumsy, and the leg with the claw wound is barely holding weight. He takes a step, trips over nothing, and just like that he’s down on one knee. He pushes himself up for another step, and then both knees buckle and why can’t he get _up,_ he starts to fall forward and the metal arm catches him but the right arm is numb, and that’s when he understands that he is about to lose. He will lose and they will bring him in for refurbishing, they will put him back in cryo, they will never let him out until long after Steve Rogers is dead, and he will never be Bucky Barnes again.

He can taste the rubber of the mouth guard they started using after that first time, when he cracked two of his own teeth during the memory wipe.

The woman is standing well back from him, face impassive, waiting for him to fall the rest of the way down. When she sees that he’s not going to—the elbow of the metal arm has locked in position, just like it’s supposed to under pressure, and he couldn’t move it now even if he wanted to faceplant in the mud—she takes a walkie out of a holster, and he feels his chest start to heave, a muscle memory he’s powerless to control. She’s calling for someone to come get him and take him back to the holding tank. His heart thuds so hard it feels like it’s about to explode, and he wishes it would, because death sounds like Christmas compared to the Chair. His lungs feel like they’re caught in a vise. He’ll pass out if he doesn’t get his breathing under control but he can’t make it stop, this full-body meltdown he’s having, and it only gets worse when he hears the walkie beep and the aggressor says, “The hostile is neutralized.”

She pauses for a beat. “And the neurotoxin needs work. You said instant. It took almost ninety seconds to bring him down.”

“I said _nearly_ instant.” The voice is young, faintly accented, and aggrieved. “And I said on a standard human. Is he enhanced?”

“I didn’t use the one for humans.”

There’s a pause, and then the voice says, in a deeply impressed tone, “That’s _cold._ Are we extracting?”

“Give me a minute.” She holsters the walkie, walks over to Barnes, and sets her feet wide as she points two pistols at him, a stance she’s obviously prepared to hold all night. She seems unfazed by his distress. “Calm down,” she says. “The paralysis will wear off in a few hours. If you cooperate, you’ll be fine.”

Calm _down?_ Barnes can’t breathe. He’s taken a lot of pain over the years, but this is the most afraid he’s been since the train. They’re going to put him back in the Chair and she wants him to _cooperate?_ “Не ставьте меня в кресле,” he says, between gasps.

“Don’t give me that. Your English is just fine.” Her guns are still trained on him; she thinks he’s faking this. Smart, but wrong. His face is wet—sweat or tears, he can’t tell—and he’s hyperventilating so hard that even with his impressive lung capacity, his vision has gone gray around the edges. Finally, with an exasperated look, she holsters one of the guns, leans forward, and rips off the night-vision goggles. “Fine. Let’s start with who you are and who you work for.”

And he breaks.

Because now it’s 1943 and he’s strapped to a table like a lab rat. Because he’ll never see Brooklyn again. Because no rescue is coming and his mother will get three lines in a telegram that don't explain why she can’t have a body to bury and they’re not even trying to get him to talk anymore, the sick Nazi bastards just keep injecting him with vial after vial of something that sets his blood on fire to see what it will _do,_ and then they ask him, over and over, the only question he’ll answer.

“S-sergeant,” he says, like he’s been doing for days now, even, sometimes, when no one is asking him to. It takes him a few tries to get it all out. “Sergeant. Sergeant James… Buchanan… B-barnes. Se… serial… number… 3-2… 5-5… 7-0… 3-8.”

The aggressor looks at him as if he’s completely lost his mind.

“Sergeant,” he says, and everything is swimming and he’s going to black out in a minute and he can’t wake up in the Chair. “James Bu… chanan Barnes. Serial number 3-2-5-5-7… 0-3-8.”

For the first time, the aggressor shows a naked emotion: exasperation. “Who do you work for? What’s your mission?”

This is what they all cling to now, the last act of defiance any of the prisoners will ever get on this earth. “Sergeant,” he says, and the panic is still right under the surface, but he can keep it there as long as he thinks about the words and not the Chair. He turns his most murderous glare on her and says, in a voice colder than cryo, “Sergeant James Buchanan Barnes, serial number 32557038. Sergeant James Buchanan Barnes, serial number 32557038. Sergeant James Buchanan Barnes, serial number 32557038.”

The aggressor sighs, and slowly pulls out the walkie. “I might have something,” she tells her command center. “I need you to run a name in the database. James Barnes, says he’s a sergeant. He’s giving me a serial number that—”

And a new voice from the walkie says, _“What?”_

“Sir?”

“Did you say _Barnes?_ ” There’s a pause. “Hold on, I’m sending you something.” Another pause, and then, “Is that him?”

The walkie apparently has a screen, because the aggressor looks at it, and now she’s even more perplexed. “Sir, this is a picture of Steve Rogers in 1943.”

What?

“The man next to Rogers. Is it him?”

“Sir.” Her voice is toneless, but she turns her eyes back to him, shifts her feet, and repositions her gun. “This has to be a trap.”

“Is it the same man or isn’t it?” A pause. “There might be some slight differences. Longer hair, cybernetic enhancements. Terrifying amounts of eyeliner.”

“There’s a resemblance, but…”

“But?”

“Respectfully, sir, everyone and their sister knows you’re a Captain America groupie.”

There’s a slightly longer pause this time. Then the voice says, “There are things that happened at the Triskelion last year that aren’t public knowledge. Seems like it’s time for this team to discuss them.” A hint of amusement creeps in: “Unless you think InGen has a plan to come at us by cloning handsome World War II soldiers and hoping we all swoon to death.”

Barnes knows he’s officially in shock because the next thought his brain comes up with is, _Well, they say they can get DNA from bones now, and I did leave an arm just lying around in a ravine in Europe somewhere._ He barks an involuntary laugh, and the aggressor shoots him a dark look.

“Sir—”

“Let him go, May.”

She looks annoyed first, then worried, then visibly swallows the response she wants to give. It’s the classic look of a soldier taking a blindingly stupid order from a CO. “He’s not restrained, sir. I used Fitz’s neurotoxin. He’s in limited paralysis.”

“I heard. The raptor-sized dose. He must have made quite an impression. Hold up the phone.”

“I can hear you,” Barnes says. It’s the first time he’s volunteered anything, and his voice cracks partway through, but his breathing is starting to normalize. These people don’t know who he is. Or, rather, they do now, because he told them, but they didn’t come here to put him in the Chair. “Who… who’s there?”

“May, give me visual.” The aggressor—May? Is that her name or a call sign? If this is May, he definitely doesn’t want to meet December—holds the walkie up in front of him, and the new player comes into view. He’s a middle-aged apparent noncombatant in a suit and tie, graying and balding, with a bland face and a low-key expression that completely belie the way May swallowed her objections to his orders. Barnes knows men like this and they are universally extremely dangerous. “It’s an honor to meet you, Sergeant,” he says. “I’m Phil Coulson, Director of SHIELD.”

SHIELD? Is this a joke? Of all the possible adversaries he’s been worried about, he got blown by the guys his HYDRA handlers couldn’t talk about without laughing?“I thought SHIELD was dead,” he says.

“That’s going around,” Coulson says mildly. “Who are you working with now, Sergeant?”

He still can’t quite believe it’s not a trick, something to lure him off guard until they can spring the Chair on him, but he’s hoping now, even though hope hurts more than anything. “No one. Just me.”

“Hm.” He turns away from the screen briefly, because a clamor has broken out among several people in the background. “Fitz. Skye. Lock it up. I’ll answer questions later.”

“Sir, if this is the Winter Sol—”

 _“Later.”_ Coulson turns back to Barnes. “After the incident with HYDRA last year, we flagged certain identity documents. The passport you used to enter Costa Rica was on that list. We’ve also been aware that HYDRA has a number of operatives within InGen, but until now, we haven’t been able to get close. I’d like to propose that we join forces.”

 _“Sir,”_ says May, but Coulson ignores her, finishing, “We’ll make you a temporary field agent. In exchange for your information, we’ll assist you in neutralizing any immediate threats within Isla Nublar. Are you interested?”

Barnes’s heart rate still hasn’t returned to baseline. He’s in no shape to make this decision, but he’s also in no shape to argue. “Just information about _this,_ ” he specifies. “Nothing else.”

“Yes.”

“Deal.” Nobody can say he doesn’t hold up his end of a bargain. “I don’t have any.”

“…Pardon?” says Coulson.

“All I know is that I heard HYDRA was weaponizing dinosaurs and that they were doing it near Costa Rica. Tonight was a recon to confirm intel.”

“You were… running solo reconnaissance against a multinational criminal organization, at night, alone, in the middle of a dinosaur-infested jungle?”

Barnes gives him a tight-lipped smile. “When you put it that way, it just sounds stupid.”

May has lowered the guns. She was telling the truth about the toxin: the paralysis is already starting to recede. He can shift his weight now, but when he tries to stand, things gray out and when they come back, he’s on his knees again. “Think we can finish this later?” he says.

“Do you need a dustoff? My mobile base has a first-class medical facility.”

So he can be, what, on a ship in the middle of the ocean with SHIELD all around him, instead of on solid ground with at least some potential escape routes? “Negative. Just need some time.”

Coulson doesn’t press it. “May, escort Special Agent Barnes back to the park. Barnes…” He looks like there are a hundred other things he wants to say, but he leaves it at, “We’ll be in touch,” and the screen goes blank.

He’ll give May this: she doesn’t waste time. He hasn’t even moved yet when she snaps something around his right wrist. It’s thick plastic, looks a little like these FitBits everybody seems to have nowadays, but some internal mechanism tightens it until it fits snugly against his skin. “This is a vital signs tracker,” she says. “If you take it off, we’ll know. If you try to leave the park, we’ll know. If you come after my team, I will rip that fancy prosthetic arm off your body and beat you to death with it. Are we clear?”

Later he’ll probably resent that she’s just tagged him like a trained dolphin, but right now he’s too tired even to snarl. “Yeah, okay.”

May is about to say something else, but there’s a sudden movement in the underbrush, and both of them spin to face it, although Barnes almost falls over in the process. A green and brown animal is approaching them, but it’s relatively small, maybe three feet high, and unlike the raptors, he can’t see any teeth. Barnes relaxes. Weird-looking thing, but in its way, it’s actually kind of cute.

Then it puffs out some kind of frill on its neck, opens its mouth about six inches wider than should even be possible, and lets out a bloodcurdling shriek, right before it leaps.

Barnes would like to keep up at least some semblance of dignity here, but his nerves have just gone all the way through panic and out the other side. He yelps, jumps six feet backwards, and lands gracelessly on his ass in four inches of mud before May raises her arm and fires two slugs into the dilophosaur’s chest. She shakes her head, sighs, and mutters, “This is what I get for thinking I can actually take a vacation.” Then she starts walking toward the wall, calling over her shoulder, “Keep up, Barnes. We have a long walk ahead of us.”

Barnes is starting to really, really, really hate this island.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I also get panic attacks and all I can say is, poor Bucky _really_ deserves a hug right now. I have a history of being terrible to fictional characters, but this is definitely one of the worst things I've ever done.
> 
> However, I do feel like I partly redeemed myself by letting Coulson mention the eyeliner.


	5. Coulson

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Spoiler alert: contains a major spoiler for the Season 2 Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. finale. Which is now on Netflix, if you guys watch that kind of thing.

It has not been the greatest day of Barnes’ life. It hasn’t been the worst, either, but for a guy who once lost an arm by falling off a mountain before getting captured by Soviet soldiers, that’s not saying much.

He doesn’t remember climbing back over the wall, but May had an ATV sitting outside the restricted zone, because screw stealth on this mission, apparently. But somehow nobody stopped them on the way back to the hotel, despite the fact that he kept graying out and coming back to consciousness in the middle of swearing about dinosaurs in Russian, singing (poorly) in French, and once, reciting the punchline of an extremely dirty joke in Italian.

He has a lot of stuff in his head, okay?

He sleeps, but it isn’t good sleep. He has the dream he thought he shook in 1944, the one where Steve pulls his mask off to reveal not his own face but the gruesome features of Johann Schmidt, only this time Schmidt has dinosaur fangs instead of teeth, which Zola assures him are beautiful, the next step in human evolution. When Barnes wakes up, he rises groggily, forgets about his injured leg, falls, curses at the world in Russian for five minutes, realizes what he’s doing and takes four tries to switch back to English, and winds up curled up at the foot of the bed with his knees hugged to his chest, convincing himself that this isn’t another meltdown, before he can actually start the day.

One of the SHIELD people has been in the hotel room while he slept. He’s not happy about that, but he also realizes he wasn’t entirely lucid when he refused medevac, so he’ll give them a pass. Whoever came in has cleaned and dressed his leg, swapped the mud-encrusted tactical vest for a clean T-shirt, and left him a care package on the dresser which contains: bottled water and antibiotics; a passport, New York drivers’ license, and credit card in the name of BARNES J B; a plastic SHIELD ID card that calls him a Consultant, Clearance Level 2; and a cell phone with a blinking voicemail icon. He puts it on speaker while he stumbles into the bathroom. The mirror shows him that his skin is almost gray from blood loss and his eyes are the definition of a thousand-yard stare, but it’ll make him feel more human to shower and shave and make his hair stop looking so much like a rat’s nest.

“Heyyy, Bucky!” says a distressingly cheerful female voice he pegs as late teens-to-early twenties. “So, wow, I’m _actually_ talking to Bucky Barnes. That’s, I mean, you’re on the SHIELD Wall of Valor. I even did a book report about the Howling Commandos in school when I was a kid.”

Barnes snorts. _Was_ a kid? When was she born, about 1994?

“Anyway, so, I’m Skye, and you’re welcome for the new IDs, that’s kind of what I do, hacker stuff and _yes, I’m getting to it, Fitz, ugh._ Fitz here is saying a lot of things which are beyond gross about how much bacteria there is in reptile claws and how you have to take all the pills he left you. And also, I think he might actually die if I don’t ask you this, so, will you let him do a scan on your metal arm? Because he’s a total nerd and he really wants to see how it works on the inside. And I have to tell you, he’s not wrong, it’s pretty awesome.”

 _Nope,_ Barnes thinks, working the comb through a stubborn tangle. Nothing good has ever come from letting scientists near him with pointy instruments. Although at least these ones started by asking nicely.

“Okay, so Coulson wants to give you some time to, you know, chill, but he says he’ll come by to see you later. And, um.” Her voice lowers. “We’d appreciate if you wouldn’t say anything about the, uh… well, you’ll see. It’s still kind of fresh. Sooo I guess we’ll be seeing you around, then. Okay, well, bye.”

These SHIELD people are obviously a bunch of lunatics. He’ll probably fit right in.

He needs fuel to kickstart his healing, so he orders room service. He keeps his left arm behind the door when he opens it, but the waiter who delivers the food still takes two steps back when he sees Barnes. “Hey, man, are you okay?” he says, and Barnes, who’s walked straight into dozens of firefights without blinking, inexplicably freezes up at this modicum of human contact before he manages to stammer something about a rough night. And to think, he used to be the charming, sociable one.

After he gets as much food in him as he thinks he can keep down, he takes a walk to the mosasaur pool. This is arguably a dumb idea with a bad leg, but sometimes walking helps him get out of his own head when punching things isn’t an option. Alone in the crowd of families at the lower viewing tank, he waits for the massive thing to swim past, a tractor-trailer-sized killing machine, and he knows he’s supposed to _ooh_ at it like everybody else, but instead, he leans his forehead against the glass, wondering if it has any idea it’s in a tank and is supposed to be extinct.

 _Gee, what a swell plan this turned out to be, Barnes. That was a real A-plus-plus concept for cheering yourself up_.

When Coulson arrives, he’s back in the hotel room, sitting on the floor with his eyes on some Animal Planet program on the flatscreen. Coulson knocks, then announces himself, then lets himself in, which is fair; it’s hard to pretend you’re not in when you’re wearing a tracking device. He’s waiting for the lecture to start—if he’s honest, he’s waiting for the punishment to start, since that's what he’s used to when a man in a suit approaches him—but instead Coulson sits on the floor beside him.

“So,” Barnes says, “you think I’m handsome, huh?”

Coulson chuckles. “It’s a pleasure to meet you,” he says, holding out his right hand. “Call me Phil.”

Barnes doesn’t take his eyes off the TV. “Call me Barnes.”

“We’re dropping Bucky? I have to tell you, I’ve always thought it was charming.”

“Only my friends ever called me that. And I’m not exactly thrilling them lately.” Something occurs to him: “Have you told Rogers I’m here?”

“Rogers and I aren’t exactly BFFs. It’s a complex situation, but suffice to say, he won’t hear about you from me or my team.”

“I thought you were a groupie.”

“I used to have all of the trading cards, before someone ruined them,” Coulson says bitterly. “A vintage set. Near mint, only slight foxing around the edges.”

“Yeah? Come back when you’ve got a Bucky bear. Then I’ll be impressed.”

“What’s a Bucky bear?”

“Come on,” Barnes says, “you had the trading cards, but you don’t know Rogers’ favorite thing to give his best pal grief about?” Coulson waits for him to go on, so he does: “Christmas 1943, Steve’s all over the newsreels, all punching Hitler in the face and yay America, and some toymaker in Manhattan gets the bright idea of selling Cap teddy bears. Sticks one in the store window and makes a Bucky bear to put next to it, for a laugh. Two months later, Bucky bears are outselling Cap bears ten to one. My sister mails one to me. Stupidest-looking thing I ever saw, has this little blue jacket with B.B. stitched on the back and it’s wearing a mask over its eyes, for some reason. Let me tell you, there’s no limit to how much shit nine bored Howling Commandos can give a guy about a thing like that. That bear haunted me until I finally put it in a mortar and fired it.”

In his peripheral vision, Coulson is grinning from ear to ear. Barnes realizes he knew exactly what a Bucky bear was; he just wanted to hear Barnes tell it. Okay, that feels good for a minute, but then Barnes’ answering smile fades. “You think I’m still this hero,” he says. “I’m not. I’m not sure I ever was, but I know I’m not now. I… lost it last night. I wasn’t me. I was the Winter Soldier.”

“Agent May asked you who you were last night,” Coulson says. “You gave an answer. I think it was a truthful one.”

Jeez, no wonder this guy has such a Steve Rogers fetish. And he’s supposed to be in charge of a spy organization? Ridiculous. Here Barnes has already pulled one dick move on Coulson, trying to buy help with intel he didn’t have, but Coulson’s still exceeding what he promised, offering him money, tech, medical treatment… No, Barnes thinks, Steve was too generous for his own good, but he wasn’t dumb, and neither is Coulson. This is all going to come at a price. “What do you want from me?” he says. “What are you trying to get out of this?”

“I’m trying to help a man who needs it,” Coulson says. “Although I would have something of a personal interest in getting a scan of that cybernetic hand.” He raises his left arm, deliberately placing it between Barnes’ eyes and the screen, and Barnes starts. Coulson’s left hand and wrist are missing.

Well. This must be the hush-hush trauma the hacker told him not to mention. Thing is, he maybe knows a little more about war wounds than a kid who doesn’t remember a world with a Soviet Union in it. He gives the stump a good look, and then he says, “Is this just something that happens to people who hang around Rogers? The guy gets in your head and eventually you just give up a limb in the service of patriotism?”

“This had nothing to do with Rogers,” says Coulson, blandly. “Word to the wise, though: never tell an Asgardian that you’d give your left arm for a cheeseburger right about now.”

It has been a long time since Barnes has let go and really laughed, the kind of big belly laugh that leaves you doubled over with a sore stomach. Coulson might be a bureaucratic tool who plans to use him for some unknown end, but now Barnes likes him. “You get phantom limb?” he asks.

“Not as much as I expected. You?”

“No, they screwed with the nerves in my shoulder, wired them into the new arm somehow. I do get phantom heat. Or cold. The arm registers pressure but not temperature. Makes for some weird feedback in my head.” But at least he has the use of two hands. _See that, Barnes? Your problems aren’t exactly small, but there’s always someone standing in deeper shit than you._

“What’ve you got for me on HYDRA?” he says.

Coulson rolls with the change of subject. “We scanned the restricted zone for electromagnetic signatures,” he says. “All we found was a handful of ferals like those raptors you ran into. If there was a base there, we would have found it. There’s nothing.”

“So this was a bust?”

“Not at all. As I said, we already had our suspicions about this place. There are some leads I’d like you to follow up. A man named Owen Grady for one, and a geneticist in the hatchery for another. I’ve sent some files to your laptop. Go over it tonight and let me know how you want to play it, and if you want any of my team to provide backup.”

“Think your Agent May could cover my six?”

“No hard feelings about last night, then?”

“Not on this end. She got the drop on me, that tells me she’s more than good enough to run an op with. And she won’t trust me. Means she’ll spot any flaws in my plans before HYDRA does.”

And if he loses it, she can take him out before he hurts somebody. This is a valid concern, whatever Coulson thinks about it.

Unlike Coulson, May obviously understands that you can’t let your guard down around dinosaurs.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Whew! Another chapter up, and thank you, Dear Readers, for sticking with me this far. I'm incredibly flattered that people are actually bookmarking this! And every comment completely makes my day.
> 
> So, yes, the next installment WILL feature Owen, and after that we should be getting back to more Badass!Bucky, now with Dinosaur-Face-Punching Action.
> 
> Edit to add: Okay, so my brain literally would not let me sleep until I caved in and wrote up an expanded version of the Bucky Bear story.  
> <http://archiveofourown.org/works/4321734>


	6. Grady

“Are you up for this?” says Melinda May, as she brings the ATV to a stop fifty yards out from what the park blueprints call Large Animal Habitat #3. “Because if you’re not, I can always take you back and talk to Grady myself.”

“I got this,” Barnes says. He’s dressed up in a jacket and gloves to hide the arm, with a fake InGen ID badge clipped to his lapel. May’s in a sharp business suit with her fake badge on a lanyard around her neck. They look like complete corporate tools and he’s sweating through the jacket, but at least his security-team getup lets him keep his boots. How May managed to drive the ATV in kitten heels is a mystery.

“Are you sure? You seem shaky.”

“I got this,” Barnes repeats. “And I know what you’re doing, but it’s not necessary.”

“I’m not doing anything. I just want to make sure you can handle it.”

 _No,_ Barnes thinks, _you want me so pissed off at you that I’ll forget to lose my shit about anything else that goes down. Joke’s on you, lady; I was using that trick to get Steve through his damn asthma attacks before your grandmother was born._ “Agent May,” he says, “you saw me go to a pretty bad place the other night. But that’s not all there is to me. I have good days, too. I have skills that have nothing to do with what happened to me. And I’m pretty sure this Grady isn’t going to drop out of a tree with a hypodermic. So how about a second chance before you write me off as either a villain or a nutjob?”

Whatever she expected from him, it wasn’t that. “You’re the boss, Barnes,” she says, and kills the engine.

Large Animal Habitat #3 is a far cry from the shiny glass and steel of the T. Rex pen. This is a facility the public is never meant to see, a couple of shoddy outbuildings and trailers surrounding a big ugly concrete structure with 20-foot walls. “Are we set, Skye?” Barnes says.

“Yeah,” says the SHIELD hacker, in his earbud. “As soon as Grady confirmed the appointment, I deleted all the messages from the server. Park Control has no idea you’re there and Grady thinks you’re a random security check. You’re good to go.”

“Great.” Barnes strides toward the structure.

A steel door opens and a man comes out to meet them, wiping his hands on a towel. Barnes looks him over. He’s dressed in sturdy work clothes—it’s a shame Barnes can’t pull off the rolled-up sleeves look, because it’s not only a good look, but a vest like that would let him carry at least one extra gun and two extra knives—and he’s smiling, but he walks with that military bearing that says _I’m not looking for trouble, but I’m ready if it finds me_. Barnes finds himself warming to the guy, and reminds himself sternly that Grady could still turn out to be a HYDRA shitbag.

“Hey,” the man says, approaching Barnes, “you must be the InGen team. I’m Owen Grady.” Then he spots May and says, “ _Hel-_ lo.”

“Jim Buchanan,” says Barnes. “And my associate, Melinda March.”

“Pleasure,” says May, in a voice that would freeze lava.

Grady takes the hint and backs off, which proves that he’s a smart man. “Come on in,” he says, and holds the door open. “I’ll show you what we’ve got.”

Inside the structure is an entrance area, with a steel grate that cuts it off from a larger enclosure that reminds Barnes vaguely of an arena. There’s a staircase leading to a railed walkway around the top of the wall, and at the other end, there are four steel doors. “Where did you serve?” Barnes asks, following Grady upward.

“NMMP, San Diego. You?”

“Here and there. Eastern Europe, mostly.”

“See any action?”

“Some.”

Grady gives him a measuring look, but doesn’t ask for details. Ex-military are usually skeptical of guys who won’t give details on where they served or what they did, but they never seem to have trouble jumping to the conclusion that Barnes was special ops. It’s the arm, he thinks. The weight. The way it changes his walk. The fact that he’s constantly carrying what amounts to a loaded weapon.

And yeah, the HYDRA grunts who used to talk in front of him like he was just a gun or a dog on the table have already given him 70 years’ worth of “disarming” jokes to work with. So adorable.

“So, will you two have time to do any sightseeing while you’re here?”

“We’ve been able to do a few things,” says Barnes.

“What’s your favorite so far?”

“Zipline,” says May.

Barnes wonders if that’s a deliberate dig. Last time he was on a zipline, it didn’t end well. “Petting zoo,” he says.

Grady laughs, but it’s not mean-spirited. “You like to get up close and personal with them, huh? Me too. What’s the point of coming all the way here if you can’t really experience the dinosaurs? Otherwise you might as well just watch ’em on TV.”

“Exactly,” says Barnes.

“Speaking of getting up close, how much background did Claire give you on my project here?”

“Corporate being on the ball about anything? Are you kidding? Boss tells me to fly to Costa Rica and look at your dinosaurs, I fly to Costa Rica to look at your dinosaurs, but that’s as much as I know.”

It’s the right answer, from Grady’s wry expression. “I’ll walk you through it, then,” he says. “Let me have one of those gloves.”

Barnes hands him the right one, and Grady hollers at a man in the yard below, “Hey, Barry! Scent drill time. We’re gonna let the ladies strut their stuff for the guests.”

“You got it, boss,” the man yells back, and walks to the end of the yard with the doors. He holds the glove up to a grate in each door for a few seconds, then exits the yard through an automated grate that locks behind him.

“Yard clear,” he shouts, “open Doors One through Four.”

The metal doors slide up, and Barnes’ left hand grips the railing hard enough that he’s in danger of bending it. It’s that snaky smell that hits him first, going straight to the back of his brain. The half-healed claw wound on his shin gives a sudden throb, and he has to physically recenter himself on the walkway.

There are four velociraptors in the pen underneath them, silent as ghosts, bodies spaced no more than six inches apart, every head aiming at him like a loaded gun.

The part of Barnes that used to lie awake in Austria, listening to wolves howling way too near the camp and wishing he could crawl into Steve’s tent and pretend they were still eight years old in a blanket fort, starts twitching. He’s glad he brought May; picturing her judging expression helps him keep his cool. “Velociraptors,” he says, for the SHIELD team’s benefit. “The park doesn’t have any of these on public display yet. What’s the project here? Are you breeding a less aggressive version to show the kids?”

“Not breeding,” says Grady, “training. Wu says the lab geeks can’t tone down the prey drive without introducing genetic defects. But people still want to see raptors, so.” He leans down and picks up a bucket. Then he whistles.

The heads swivel toward Grady in unison, the back haunches drop, and Barnes remembers Alisha at the petting paddock saying, “So far, nobody’s had any luck getting the herbivores to do anything.”

Not the herbivores, no. This was the lead he should have been following.

“You familiar with animal training at all?” Grady asks.

Barnes’ neck twinges where the shock collar used to rest. “A little.”

“A lot of people think you can measure an animal’s intelligence by how well it responds to commands,” Grady says. “I call bullshit. These are the smartest animals I’ve ever met, but they won’t cooperate worth a damn unless there’s something in it for them. They need to know you can offer them something they can’t get themselves. The treat, sure, but also the validation of being part of your team. That’s important.” Grady takes a dead rat out of the bucket and holds it up. “Delta,” he says, “haw!” and the raptor that’s third in line breaks left.

It’s an impressive show. Grady sends the raptors across the yard and back, makes them still, makes the one he calls Blue lie down on her belly and splay her front limbs. “We’ll get to ‘roll over’ one of these days,” he says, with a chuckle. He rewards each success by tossing down another rat, and finally finishes with, “Rest!” The raptors swivel and dash back to their pens, and Grady turns back to Barnes. “Want to take a closer look?”

Barnes wants to go back to his hotel room, load himself up with the pain pills his new SHIELD friends left on the dresser, and hyperventilate quietly for half an hour, because he’s figured a few things out during Grady’s raptor show that he wishes he hadn’t. But the only right answer is, “How close do you get?”

“Come around the back,” Grady says.

There’s an opening in the back of each raptor pen with an oddly shaped metal cage bolted to it. Grady makes a clucking sound at the first one, and Blue’s head slides into the cage, neck resting on a metal strut. “Easy, beautiful,” Grady says, and presses a button. Inside the pen, something clunks into place, and the raptor bares its teeth and vocalizes. “S’okay, girl. We have to be able to handle them safely,” he explains. “For routine blood work, or if they get a little enthusiastic about playtime and tear each other up, they might need a couple stitches. We need them restrained, but also relaxed. It took a while, but now they’re like dogs with crates. They’ll put their own heads in and hang out for hours like this, watching what’s outside. Don’t’cha, girl?” He scratches her chin the same way Alisha did with the baby triceratops, then motions for Barnes to do the same.

He does, laying his right hand on the animal’s skin. The raptor’s eyes follow him, and he feels the neck muscles tense. The lips draw back in one of those alligator smiles, but Grady says, “Uh-uh,” in a warning tone, and the raptor relaxes fractionally.

After leaving his hand on the raptor’s neck just long enough to prove his point, Barnes withdraws it, because he is still not stupid. “How often do you have an injury incident?” he says, returning to his cover story.

“Three this year, and every time, I spent days filing reports and walking the brass through why it wasn’t my negligence that did it. No zoo has a perfect safety record, how could we? Still, it’s a big improvement since they upgraded the gates, like I told them to do eighteen months ago.”

Grady runs this tight of a ship, and still, three injuries? What are these InGen lunatics think—oh. Right.

“Have you seen what you needed?” says Grady.

“I think so. Anything else you’d like to see here, Ms. March?”

“You’re the boss, sir,” says May, which means he hasn’t made any obvious blunders. That’s heartwarming.

“Then we won’t keep you. Thanks for your time, Mr. Grady.”

They shake hands, and Barnes is walking back toward the ATV when Grady says, almost casually, “I thought Masrani wanted to keep this project on the down low. You know, since he only said ‘don’t blow the surprise for the kids’ five hundred times, and yet, here comes another team for another security check barely two weeks after the last one, from another InGen facility I’ve never heard of before.”

“Is that a question?” Barnes says, carefully.

“More of a statement. I’m not saying you two aren’t an InGen team.” He glances between Barnes and May. “But if a couple of ex-soldiers with animal handling experience happened to show up here looking for an answer to a specific question, the answer would be no. This is the best squad we’ve ever had, but that doesn’t mean we’re ready to show them, much less… do anything else. And I’d say, tell your bosses to take a real close look at Hoskins before they make any deals.”

“Thank you,” says Barnes, because that was the final piece he needed to be sure. “And, Grady? Be careful.”

“Always am, man. I work with dinosaurs, for God’s sake.”

Barnes sure as hell hopes so.

When he’s sure they’re out of earshot, Barnes says, “Coulson, bring me in to your base. We need to talk.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> RAPTOR SQUAD.
> 
> (Also, if that kind of writing was even _remotely_ in my wheelhouse, I would have arranged for some Bucky/Owen by now. C'mon, Internet, you know what to do.)


	7. The Dogs of War

Coulson’s team is set up in an old bomb shelter under a library in Puerto Limón, because SHIELD likes its ridiculous secret bases almost as much as HYDRA does.

There’s probably a larger team on site, but Barnes is only meeting with a fraction of the crew tonight, for his sake and theirs. Skye, the hacker, is smart and competent, but she’s trying to pass herself off as just a little more badass than she actually is. She reminds him of the old Steve, in a funny way: a deeply fragile kid playing tough and pugnacious to hide the damage. Fitz, the scientist, has an excitable tendency to let his Scots-inflected sentences run away with him—not that what he’s trying to explain would probably be within the grasp of someone with a 1930s high school education, anyway. Both of them are pretending not to be terrified of the Winter Soldier.

Barnes doesn’t love that, but he gets it. When they saw him unconscious, filthy, and having just had the crap kicked out of him by their friend May, he was a curiosity, maybe even an object of pity, like an animal in a zoo. Seeing him strut into their base with a metal arm that can rip off a car door, they’re remembering that he’s the one who tore up the Triskelion and beat Captain America to a bloody pulp. He holds the arm close to his body and tries to remember how to be the prewar Bucky, the one who learned to be charming because somebody had to talk the butcher into an extra pork chop and the landlord into waiting two days for the rent. But when he tries to thank Fitz for the neat line of surgical staples holding his leg together, Fitz says, “Jemma would’ve done a better job,” then clams up and won’t tell him who Jemma is or was, which just makes the situation more awkward.

May sticks close to them, and he tries to believe that she’s doing it to reassure Skye and Fitz, not because she’s looking for an excuse to kick the crap out of him again with impunity.

When Coulson assembles them around a table, Skye is typing away at her laptop. “I intercepted a message from Grady to the park control room,” she says. “He just said he was done showing you around, though. If he’s suspicious about you two, he’s not saying anything. Oh, and May, he says to ask if he can have your phone number.”

“Tell him I’m taken,” says May.

“Tell him I’m not,” Barnes says, with a grin, because after all, what the hell? A lot of things go on these days that the old Barnes didn’t even know were options.

He doesn’t manage to lighten the mood any, though; the three SHIELD agents are still looking at him as if he might explode any second. So Coulson goes straight to business. “Why don’t you walk us through what you’re seeing here, Agent Barnes?” he says.

 _Agent_ Barnes. Too bad this is all playacting and SHIELD would never really take him in, because he’s starting to like the sound of that. “Skye,” he begins, “you were listening in on our meeting with Grady, right? He mentioned a name, Hoskins—”

“I found somebody named Hoskins who’s pretty high up in the InGen security division,” she says, already two steps ahead of him, “but there’s nothing on the Net that raises a flag. If he’s HYDRA, he’s keeping it pretty quiet.”

“What makes you so sure Owen Grady isn’t the one who’s HYDRA?” May says. “He’s the closest to the animals, after all. He could be trying to throw us off his trail.”

“Grady definitely isn’t HYDRA,” says Barnes.

“How do you know? And I hope you have more to go on than ‘I could just tell’ or ‘He’s not the type.’ Anybody can be fooled by a good enough agent, and I mean anybody.”

 _Was that a mistake, Agent May,_ Barnes wonders, _or are you deliberately giving me a clue about why you find it hard to believe in me?_ He’s careful in his reply: “Grady’s the opposite of what HYDRA looks for in an animal handler. Positive reinforcement is too slow, and they sure as hell don’t want anybody who cares more about the animals’ well-being than about getting as much work as they can out of them. HYDRA handlers are all stick and no carrot.”

“What makes you the expert?” May challenges.

“Who do you think they got to handle me?”

Coulson breaks the sudden silence with, “You seem to be seeing something here that we’re not, Barnes. Clue us in.”

“Right. Skye, you said you did some kind of scan of the old park, right?”

“A full-spectrum electromagnetic satellite image,” she supplies. “There’s nothing going on in there. No radio, no wifi, no electrical grid, not even any disturbed dirt from recent construction. No human activity at all.”

“It’s not human activity I want to look at. Can you scan again, but looking for dinosaurs? And do you have a way to pick out the meat eaters?”

“I can find the dinosaurs, sure, but I can’t tell what they’re eating.”

“Start with body temperature,” says Fitz. “Carnivores run hotter than herbivores. The equipment’s sensitive enough to pick that up. If we add a parameter for size, we can maybe even guess the breeds.”

This SHIELD team is even better than having Howard Stark in your corner.

There’s a brief pause while Skye and Fitz go into science mode, and a little bit of bickering while they Google dinosaur body temperature ranges, and then Skye says, “Got it,” and then Fitz looks at the screen and says, “Wait, run it again. Something went wrong.”

“No, this is the same result I got last time. I mean, minus the three velociraptors B.B. took out.”

“B.B.?” Barnes repeats.

“Bucky Barnes. B.B. Come on, it’s cute, like a Bucky bear.”

“Yeah,” says Barnes, “we’re not doing that.”

“It can’t be right, though,” Fitz says, “it completely violates the Lotka-Volterra predator-prey model,” and Barnes realizes that the kid is about to do his job for him and that it’s going to be a shame when he doesn’t understand a word of it. “Look at the population density. There’s always a cycle in nature. You get too many predators, the prey animals can’t sustain them. No rabbits for the wolves to eat, wolves die off, rabbits come back. You need a zero-growth line for a stable population, and this is exponentially—”

“English, Fitz,” says Coulson, with the air of a person who’s been through this before.

“There’s a bloody lot of little herbivores in here, and a few of the smaller carnivores as well, but if we count the three that Barnes killed, that’s sixteen raptors. The whole restricted zone can’t be more than, what, fourteen kilometers? This population density is way too high for any point in a cycle.”

“Sixteen doesn’t seem like that many,” May says.

_Maybe not for you, lady, but this fuckin’ leg wound says otherwise._

“It is, though,” Fitz says. “You probably would’ve seen more than three if they weren’t so territorial, because for them, this is like being packed in like sardines.”

“Here’s what I’m wondering,” says Skye. “How are there any dinosaurs in there at all? It’s been, what, twenty years since a _few_ animals got loose in the original park. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t believe InGen really cleaned them all up, but everybody knows the dinosaurs in the park can’t breed. How are there any left if they’re all eating each other?”

“Who said they can’t breed?” says Barnes.

“Well, InGen, who cloned them and should know—” Fitz begins, and then he says, “Oh.”

“After May and I split up this afternoon, I finally took some advice I got on my first day in the park,” Barnes goes on. “I went on the lab tour. Two things stood out to me there. First, it’s hard to make a dinosaur. I mean, obviously, but you’d think once you had one, you could clone copies, right? But there’s still a matter of growing them. Takes all kinds of tanks and chemicals to get from a few cells to an egg. I have no idea what three-quarters of the stuff in the lab even was…” He pauses.

“Barnes?” says Coulson.

“Sorry, nothing.” Except that the few things he did recognize, they looked… well, they looked a lot like the cryo tank they kept him in, once. If this whole setup didn’t stink of HYDRA before, it really stinks now. “The first part is, it’s hard to do, even with just about unlimited resources. Here’s the next part: apparently the first park had a problem with employees trying to steal dinosaur eggs, so now they lock everything up like Fort Knox. Constant external audits, security cameras everywhere. I figure you’d need half a dozen collaborators to get a single egg out, and you can’t pull that kind of stunt often. But if you do manage to get a few and set them loose to breed, nature does the hard part for you.”

“A system like this can’t sustain itself, though,” says Fitz. “Every so often, you’d have to cull the herd.”

Poor kid, still thinking like the good guys. “No,” he says, “every so often you’d be _able_ to _harvest_.”

“And then what?”

“Have you ever looked into all the things people use dogs for in wartime?” Barnes says. “I’ve seen a lot of them. Attack dogs are obvious, but also sentries, trackers… Hell, in Russia we even tried them out as suicide bombers. Today I saw Grady run a scent drill with his raptors, and they’re at least as smart as dogs, besides being bigger and meaner. Imagine the damage HYDRA could do by setting a velociraptor loose in Tel Aviv with a bomb strapped to its chest.”

Fitz and Skye both look a little sick, and Barnes wishes he hadn’t brought up the dogs. Other than the big German shepherds that Schmidt’s guards had in the prison, he’s always liked dogs. Wouldn’t mind having one of his own someday, if he ever manages to settle down and make a life for himself somewhere. He can’t say he likes the raptors, exactly, but even they deserve better than ending up in HYDRA’s clutches like he did.

“We could clear out the feral animals easily enough with SHIELD tech,” Coulson says, “but that’s not enough. I want to find out who’s behind this and make them stop.”

Not as much as Barnes does. HYDRA sons of bitches. Bad enough their eternal quest for the next super soldier now extends to some of the smartest, most predatory animals that technically shouldn’t even be on the planet. If he finds out that any of their plans even remotely involve a stegosaurus, he will burn down their world.

“I want that too,” he tells Coulson. “However many people are in on this, they’re probably checking up on the animals in the old park sometimes. The problem is, I have no idea how often. Short of a stakeout that could go on for months, how do we find them? I thought about breaking into the lab, but their security’s too tight for me to get in undetected, and getting spotted—especially _me_ getting spotted—would blow the whole operation.”

“What about you, Skye? Can you hack into their network and take a look around?”

“I took a peek this afternoon, but they have _tight_ security on their servers. The reason nobody else has managed to make living dinosaurs is that they have multiple layers of safeguards on anything that might even look like a trade secret. They’ve kept everybody out of their tech without a real breach for more than twenty years.”

“Is that a no?” says Coulson.

“It’s more of a ‘give me a double espresso and ask me again in about six hours,’” says Skye.

Cocky little kid. Doesn’t remind him of anyone at all. “Does that mean I can borrow him for one of those hours?” he asks, tilting his head toward Fitz.

The kid starts so hard that he practically falls out of his chair. “Me,” he says, “why?”

“Because you and me, Fitz, we’re going to go do some science.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> 1\. Some of my research for this was _horrible._ My dogs have no idea why they got so many extra cuddles and treats throughout the writing of this chapter.
> 
> 2\. "Science, Biatch."


	8. Lola

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> You guys. THE ANT MAN END CREDITS SCENE. I am having a hard time explaining to people who aren't invested in the MCU why I am so profoundly not okay right now.
> 
> Double-long chapter today.

The lab is underground like the rest of the SHIELD base, and Barnes has a moment of vertigo when he walks inside. Not all labs do this to him. The chrome and glass of the Jurassic World hatchery, with its touchscreens and holographic displays everywhere, was fine; that was more like something out of the pulp stories of his childhood, all shiny and luminous and full of dreams for the future. But this place, with windowless brick walls and too-bright lights over steel tables, is its opposite: the flat reality of his own past.

He used to wake up in rooms like this, bunkers and vaults repurposed to hold the cryo tank and the Chair. Used to wake up with one driving need: get his mission, carry it out. The mission objective didn’t matter any more than the identity of the mission head did. Lukin and Zemo and Oberheuser, Pierce and Strucker and Gao—whoever it was became the center of his universe. The Asset was starved for approval, craved it like a drug. It was good when he had a task to do, the harder the better, because risk forced him to focus and pushed the flashes of other places and times out of his head. But when he finished, when they told him he’d done well—when Lukin patted his shoulder and said, “Пять баллов, Петру́шка,” or Pierce looked in his eyes and told him his work was a gift—that was the only time the Asset’s mind was quiet, even though it meant that soon they’d be putting him back in the Chair.

“A-agent Barnes?” Fitz says, taking a step back. “Are you…”

“Just a minute.” He puts the metal hand against the table, because it won’t shake like his right hand will, and makes himself take a couple of controlled breaths. “Sorry,” he says, “got dizzy. Must be more tired than I—what the hell?”

The hologram is just the fingers and part of the palm, but it’s recognizably his hand, traced in blue light, hanging in the air two feet in front of him at almost eye level. The entire table must be a scanner. He wiggles the fingers and the hologram blurs like the snow on an old TV screen.

“Don’t do that,” says Fitz, who can summon the full authority of an electronics nerd when a machine is involved. “Eats up power in the holotable. If you’re ready to let me scan the arm, put it up on the table and let me take a full image.”

Holotable. Right. “Would anything bad happen if somebody scanned their whole body in this?”

“Not at all, we do it all the time. Safer than an MRI. You’d have to get up on the table to—Oh, we’re doing this now? Well, just lie still then.”

It’s stupidly hard to lie still as soon as someone tells him to. He controls his twitchy reflexes with deep breathing and stubbornness until Fitz says, “Right, we’re clear,” and then he gets up and the scan remains, the bones and musculature of his body all traced in blue light. Fitz glances at him once, then reaches into the space above the table and makes a complicated motion that zooms in on the arm and shoulder. “Would you look at that.”

Barnes does, and feels a little sick. He’s used to seeing the outside casing of the arm with the red star on the shoulder, but he never looked closely when they opened it for repairs. Now he knows that on the inside, the metal arm looks nothing like an arm. He always pictured a bone-like framework, even if it was just metal struts. But no, it’s all loops of wire and screws and reinforced metal plates all the way up to the shoulder joint, where a ball of metal slots into the pale bone of his clavicle.

Barnes is also pretty sure that when he fell, the break point in his arm was closer to the elbow than the shoulder. But hell, why would HYDRA bother to save actual human blood and bone when they could just chop the whole business off and replace it with a machine? No wonder his shoulder socket always hurt like a son of a bitch when he came out of cryo. It’s wrapped around a cold metal thing that’s not even remotely human.

“They wired your axillary nerve cluster into the framework,” Fitz says, pointing at a squiggle of lines that looks exactly like every other squiggle to Barnes. “This is… mad. Mad and a bit genius. Well, I’m _not_ chopping up Coulson’s elbow to get at the ulnar nerve. Someone else can do that part.”

“How do you zoom out on this thing?” Barnes asks.

Fitz does another motion, and Barnes watches, then reaches in and reverses the motion to zoom back in. He recenters it twice before he’s got his skull centered in front of them, and then—this feels weird, he won’t lie—he flicks his fingers outward the way Fitz did, and everything disappears except the image of his brain.

 _Ha! See that, Rogers? I do have one. Told you I could prove it._ He reaches in and tries to turn the image clockwise, but whatever he does sets it spinning slowly instead. “What…” he begins, stumbles over how big the question is, and then tries again: “Where’s the part that makes me _me_?”

He maybe should’ve asked for a real doctor for this, but he isn’t surprised when Fitz knows. “You’re asking where in the brain is the personality center? Er, well, it’s complicated, but… I suppose you’d say that bit?”

“What does brain damage look like?” When Fitz hesitates, he sighs, “Don’t kid me, Fitz. I’d be an idiot to think I got out of that Chair with everything intact.”

Reluctantly, Fitz points to a dark, dense spot on the scan, a thing that looks for all the world like a charred burn mark, and Barnes lets out a breath. It’s nowhere near the other place. He didn’t realize until this moment how worried he was about that. Sure, _he_ thinks he’s getting closer to the old James Buchanan Barnes of Brooklyn, New York, USA, but how would he know if he was wrong? The implication of this scan, the painful little hope it gives him, is that somewhere underneath the layers of trauma and conditioning, there’s a core of Bucky Barnes that HYDRA couldn’t tear out. That next time, that’s the piece Steve will see, instead of a stranger in a friend’s body.

“You know,” Fitz says, unaware of the crisis he’s just averted, “an interesting thing about brains is they’re very plastic. Sometimes, when a bit gets damaged, the neurons can route themselves around it, relearn. Probably not a surprise that your damage is all to do with accessing long-term memories, not with storing them. It makes me wonder if HYDRA had to keep doing this,” he points to the burn mark, “over and over because they knew you kept finding ways around it.”

Barnes is touched. Fitz thinks he was trying to remember Bucky. Too bad he’s wrong, and the Asset was usually specifically trying not to think about anything outside the mission he was woken for. This is no more than Zola’s serum lurking in his body, repairing his brain over the objections of the same lunatics who broke it. But these SHIELD people, they continue to be kind to him, giving him credit in the places where he least expects it.

“Thanks for this,” he says, gesturing at the scan. “That’s all I wanted to know. Let me know if you need to see the arm again.”

“That was all you meant by ‘science’?” Fitz looks mildly offended. “One scan? I thought you had something interesting lined up. That you were going to want me to build a grenade launcher that fires baby T. Rexes or something.”

“Well, if you have one of those,” Barnes says, with a smile that even surprises him. “I thought looking at a brain _was_ a lot of science. I was born in 1917, remember, and being on the receiving end of all this stuff doesn’t mean I understand it. Biggest scientific achievement of my life up till now has been handing Howard Stark a wrench.”

“You met Howard Stark? _The_ Howard Stark?”

Twice, actually, and isn’t today just one beautiful list of things Barnes wishes he’d never opened his big mouth about. Most of the Asset’s kills he can look at dispassionately: he doesn’t absolve himself of responsibility, but if he hadn’t done them, someone else would have. But when he remembered that one—a crumpled car door, the sharp smells of gasoline and bourbon, a fur coat drenched in blood—it took days before he could piece himself back together. That one felt personal.

But it’s not helping anyone if he only thinks about the bad parts, is it? It’s up to him to decide if he’s going to lie on the floor for the rest of his life or own what he’s done, pick himself up, and work for redemption. If he’s going to remember the good times, and why he started fighting the war in the first place.

“I’d seen the guy once,” Barnes says, slowly, every word coming with an effort. “The Stark Expo in New York. I was about to ship out, go fight Nazis, last thing in the world I wanted to do. I had no idea if I was ever coming home, and Steve… Steve just seemed to be missing the part of his brain that could see how scared shitless I was. I dragged him to the expo because I was trying to show him there was a whole future to think about, after the war. That Steve would be one of the guys making that future. And then Howard Stark walked out and this guy, there was a war on and he wasn’t scared, and he got up onstage and he _made a car fly,_ and all of a sudden, maybe the future was closer than I thought, you know? Maybe there was hope that a scared kid from Brooklyn could make it through the war and come back home.

“So a year later, out of nowhere, we’re in London, and Steve says to me, ‘Buck, I gotta go see Howard Stark about a thing, you wanna come?’” Barnes snorts. “Do I wanna meet the guy who builds flying cars. You’d think if you’re me, the guy who used to pull Captain America out of fights he was losing, you’d get over being starstruck, but I walk in and can’t even talk. So Steve starts to introduce me, and Stark says, ‘There’s only one thing I care about right now, Rogers: is your friend any less useless than you around machines? Because if he is, I need him to find my three-eighths-inch socket wrench.’”

Fitz laughs, and damn, does that feel good. He hasn’t talked this much in years, and the kid has been listening patiently and attentively to every word, even the ones Barnes tripped over. “Did you find it?”

“Yeah. After a while I loosened up and started talking to him, too. In a funny way, he and I had more in common than he and Steve did. We got the car running and I got to see it fly again, but that was a mixed blessing, because a week later he took it out drunk, crashed it in Trafalgar Square, and put himself in the hospital. And that was pretty much the end of flying cars, which is a damn shame, because I gotta admit, a future with dinosaurs is pretty good, but I would’ve loved to see a flying car again.”

Suddenly, Fitz is grinning like a maniac. “All right,” he says, “listen, I’m going to show you something, but you have to swear you’ll _never_ tell Coulson that it was my idea.”

 

“It was Fitz’s idea,” Barnes says, 30 minutes later. He’s sitting in the front seat of a cherry-red Corvette that’s hovering three feet off the ground. He doesn’t even need to drive it anywhere. He’s just sitting in the driver’s seat, feeling the engine rumble under the hood. It’s the most beautiful goddamn thing Barnes has ever seen in his life and he’s counting the baby stegosaurus.

No wonder Coulson’s expression really is of a man at war with himself. A Captain America groupie torn between indulging Cap’s buddy and risking catastrophic damage to his ride. And he has a view from a flying car for all of it. This is _fun._

Barnes slowly closes his metal fingers around the steering wheel, and Coulson’s face turns the color of chalk. “Get out of Lola, Barnes,” he says, in a strangled voice.

Barnes throws the gearshift into park to make the car sink to the floor, cuts the ignition, and tosses the keys back to Coulson, who catches them with a stony expression. “Seriously, though, don’t blame Fitz,” he says. “You’re the one who invited me into your base, knowing I’m equal parts adorable and terrifying. How were your people supposed to resist me? Sorry, Phil, but this one’s on you.”

That last part is for May. She and Skye are in the doorway behind Coulson, and he’s sure that just for a second, May was actually laughing.

Coulson gives his entire team a look that says _we’ll see about this later_ and gives Barnes a look of deep betrayal as Barnes gets out of the car and joins the rest of the team. “Go ahead and fill him in, Skye,” he says.

Skye walks to the garage bay's holotable and jacks her laptop into a port on the side. Blue-etched words and images swim up in front of them. “The bad news is, I can’t get into the servers from here,” she says. “They’re using military-grade encryption, but I should be able to get in if I can get access from onsite somewhere inside the lab itself.”

Barnes starts mentally cataloging. “The building is open to tourists, but you’d need a distraction, then a way to cut the security cameras, then staff access—it’s all bio scanners, so a handprint probably—and then an extraction plan. So the building layout and the electrical grid…”

“We’ll get it,” May says easily. “It’s not the first time SHIELD has run this kind of op.”

“…But then, once you’re in, how much time? And what are you even looking for? You’re not going to find a folder called ‘secret HYDRA experiments, do not open.’ There are, what, a hundred employees in that lab?”

“That’s the good news. I’ve narrowed it down to just one who’s using heavy encryption on a lot of his communications. He’s also got more than enough access to arrange for smuggling dinosaurs out of the lab and into the restricted zone.” Skye taps one of the folders projected in light over the table, and a photo pops up. “This is the Chief Genetic Engineer for the entire park. His name is—”

“Henry Wu,” says Barnes.

Everybody has turned to look at him now, but he doesn’t notice. His eyes are fixed on the image of a man in a white lab coat. The man is smiling, standing in front of one of those bubbling display tanks full of bones and wires—pure theater, they don’t even build the dinosaurs using these, but HYDRA just can’t let go of this notion of putting things in tanks, can they? The man looks intelligent, but also insufferably smug. Or maybe that’s just Barnes’ memory talking.

“I know him,” he says. “And you’re right, Skye. Henry Wu is HYDRA to the core. He’s the only man who could come up with a plan to weaponize raptors. I should have guessed earlier. I should have remembered that—”

“Barnes,” says Coulson. “Your hand, please.”

Barnes looks down, startled, and forces his hand to unclench. A motor in the metal arm is squealing in protest, and no wonder. He’s left four finger-shaped gouges in the top of the two-inch-thick steel table. “I know Henry Wu,” he says again.

They all wait for him to explain, but he can’t say any more than that.

There’s a brief quiet, and then Coulson says, “I’m moving ahead with the plan Skye’s laid out. We need to gather evidence that Wu is working for HYDRA, and we need to apprehend him and bring him in for trial. Is this going to be a problem for you, Agent Barnes?”

Agent Barnes.That was about as subtle as a brick through plate glass, wasn’t it? He could be Bucky Barnes, Agent of SHIELD, and apprehend Wu in order to turn him over for trial and trust the system from there. Or he could kill Wu, and prove that he's still the Winter Soldier.

 _This is your chance to show that you’re more than what they made you,_ says a voice in his head that sounds suspiciously like Steven Grant Rogers.

 _Oh, come on, Barnes,_ says a voice that sounds more like his own. _There’s no way to bring a man like Wu to justice for everything he’s done, but you know better than anybody that there’s a way to make sure a man like him never hurts anyone else. It starts and ends with two in the chest and one in the head._

He takes a deep breath. “You’re right, Director. The mission is capture and subdue,” he says, looking Coulson in the eyes. “We’ll find proof of what he’s been up to and turn him in to the authorities to face justice.”

And when Coulson nods sharply and turns away, Barnes wonders which of the two of them is more convinced he’s lying.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Once again, I know that this chapter contains insufficient dinosaurs, sorry. Will be getting to the part of this story that coincides with the movie soon and then we'll have some fun.
> 
> Tip: try saying "baby T. Rexes" out loud in a Scottish accent. It cheered me up remarkably.


	9. Containment Anomaly

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> My milkshake brings all the biomechanically enhanced assassins to the yard.

The lab job goes off without a hitch. Barnes and Skye walk up to the lab and get in line for the tour that runs every hour. They ooh at the dinosaur eggs like tourists—if he doesn’t have to pretend to be entranced when they actually see a tiny pteradon beak emerging from one of the eggs, he’ll never admit it—and when they get near the staff access doors on the third floor, Barnes says “Go” and May, crouching outside near the breaker box, hits a button on a cute little SHIELD device that cuts power to the building. The blip triggers a reset on the door locks and security cameras before the backup generator kicks in, and Skye slips through the door and slots a card into one of the computers that installs a handy little back door into the security system. The hardest thing Barnes has to do is distract a couple of security guards until Skye is back with the tour group, and given that every civilian in the place is milling around and complaining about the disruption, it’s not a hard job.

All in all it’s a good morning’s work, especially considering that they’re met at the exit by a park rep who apologizes profusely and gives everybody a lunch voucher for their trouble. Barnes remembers the Depression too well to turn down free food, so he and Skye wind up in something called a Margaritaville, which makes a decent cheeseburger. Skye orders him the namesake drink when she discovers that he’s never had one, but it only takes one swallow for him to decide that if he could still get drunk, he wouldn’t choose lime-flavored lighter fluid to do it. He pushes it across the table and orders a strawberry milkshake instead.

“This is like a bad joke,” Skye says, for the benefit of anyone on the SHIELD team who’s listening in. “World’s scariest assassin walks into a bar and asks for pink ice cream. It’s actually embarrassing.”

“You go seventy years without a milkshake and see if you still think so.” Barnes swallows most of it in a gulp because it will annoy her, and because what’s the point of being a genetically enhanced supersoldier if you don’t get to ignore ice cream headaches? “Better yet, I’ll take you to Brooklyn and buy you an egg cream. Soda fountains are still a thing, right?”

 _“Egg_ _cream?_ That sounds revolting.”

“If by ‘revolting’ you mean ‘the best beverage on the planet.’”

“I’ll try your gross drink if you tell me why you’re so pissed at Henry Wu.”

Damn it. Not that he was exactly feeling lighthearted and carefree after yesterday, but until now, he was putting up a good front. “No,” he says.

“I don’t like going into things without all the facts.”

“The facts are that Wu is a _very bad man_. Stop asking.”

“When I get into his files, I’ll find everything anyway.”

“Then I won’t be the one who’s responsible for your nightmares,” Barnes says softly.

Skye looks unsettled, but she recovers her poise and huffs at him, turning her attention to the tablet computer that’s sitting on the table, churning through data. “We’ll see.”

He doubts she will. There’s absolutely no reason Wu would keep files from twenty-year-old failed HYDRA experiments on the server of his current employer. But he’s unwilling to get into an argument. “How’s that going?” he asks, with a glance at the tablet.

“I’m copying all Wu’s files over to SHIELD. Then I’ll run an algorithm to see what we’ve got.” She glances around the restaurant. “It might go faster if we get out of here and go somewhere with less drain on the wifi. It’s starting to fill up.”

It is, and the crowd flowing into the restaurant is only a little less dense outside. Barnes starts to feel fidgety, and not just because he hates crowds. The park is designed to hold a _lot_ of people without feeling packed, even at lunchtime, and any new traffic pattern is suspicious. “Hang on,” he says to Skye, “I’m going to check this out.”

He cuts across the boulevard and elbows his way through the crowd—even with the bandages-and-sling disguise, a metal arm is _great_ for that—until he reaches the fence around the petting paddock. “Hey, Alisha,” he calls.

Alisha is there, just like he hoped. She’s helping a small child down from the back of—is that a very, very tiny brontosaurus? That _is_ a tiny brontosaurus and he’s definitely coming back to take another look at it later. “Hey,” Alisha says, recognizing him. “You’re still here! Team Stegosaurus, right?”

“Best dinosaur ever,” Barnes agrees. “It got busy all of a sudden. What’s going on?”

Alisha makes a face. “They shut down everything north of the aviary. General alert just came over the radio a couple minutes ago. It’s horrible when they do this. Everybody crowds into the middle of the park, even though there are still plenty of other things open.”

“Why would they shut things down?”

“Oh, probably a lightning strike or a tropical storm coming in. That happens sometimes.” She glances at him again, smiles, and leans in close. “Although _sometimes,_ it’s because a dinosaur got loose.”

“You’re kidding me.”

He’s turning on the old Bucky charm, and remarkably, it’s working. She’s giving him the inside scoop. “The pachycephalosaurs are really bad for escaping. The ones with the big bones in their skulls? They headbutt things constantly, and every once in a while, one of them shorts the fence and they take a walk. Management’s always afraid they’ll charge a Jeep or something, so they shut everything down until they get them penned up.”

He tries to look appropriately wide-eyed. “Do any other dinosaurs ever get out?”

“Yeah, they call it a ‘containment anomaly,’” she snorts. “It’s never happened with a carnivore, though. Don’t worry, nobody’s getting eaten today.”

“Thanks for telling me what’s up.” He risks a little truth on her, too: “Crowds kind of freak me out.”

“I get that. Well, you could try the botanical garden. Not many people are really fascinated by old plants.”

“Thanks. Maybe I will.”

Barnes makes his way back to Skye, who punches him lightly on his non-metal shoulder. “Look at you,” she says. “James Barnes, ladies’ man. She’s into you.”

“Don’t be ridiculous.” He flips the transmittal switch on the tiny SHIELD earbud he wore for the morning’s mission, conveniently hidden under his hair. “Barnes to Coulson. Do you copy?”

“You don’t have to do radio protocol on the comm links, Barnes,” says Coulson, amused.

“There’s something I need to check out. I want May to take Skye somewhere safe so she can keep working.”

“Okay, first off, I can handle walking across a theme park,” says Skye, “and second, uh, _no,_ I’m going with you.”

“No, you’re not, because I need you to be my eyes.” He holds up his wrist, showing her the Fitbit-looking thing. “You can track me using this, right? I want you to get the satellite image up and let me know if anything’s coming at me. Either dinosaur or human.”

“You think this is all a distraction so they can harvest the restricted zone,” says May, falling into step beside him so smoothly that she could have been there the whole time. He's not really surprised that she has the same trick as that Romanoff woman of popping out of nowhere, or that she doesn’t waste time waiting for him to confirm it. “Is there any point trying to talk you out of going to see for yourself?”

“No.”

“Are you going in to see the operation or to stop it?”

If Wu shows up, Barnes is going to kill him, obviously, but Wu probably won’t. These days he’s undoubtedly got plenty of low-level HYDRA schmucks to get their hands dirty for him, and Barnes is fine with the underlings living nice long lives in federal prison. “Surveillance only, for now. I won’t engage.”

“Then you’ll need recording equipment to gather evidence we can actually use later.” She hands him a sharp-looking piece of headgear that falls somewhere between sunglasses and tactical goggles, with a tiny camera mounted to one side. “And this,” she hands him a duffel bag, “is in case you run into any more wildlife.”

Barnes unzips the duffel, looks inside, and says, “Melinda May, if you weren’t taken, I’d kiss you right now.”

“Which gun is it?” Coulson says wearily, in the earbud.

“The M4,” says May.

“Remind me never to put Barnes and Barton in the same room.”

“Get going, Barnes,” May says. “And don’t get hurt. I don’t want to have to haul you out of there again.”

“I’ll be careful.” He’s a little surprised she isn’t the one insisting on coming with him, but either she sees the sense of his plan, or she trusts him. He doesn’t have time to dwell on which one it is. He’s got a mission to complete.

The monorail is still running on its loop, ferrying stragglers out of the closed area, which means it takes him right back into the closed area. The nearest stop to the restricted zone is almost deserted. He dodges the park security staff easily, and from there it’s a short hike across easy terrain to the wall. No herbivores in this area; maybe the HYDRA op spooked them. As he nears the wall, he sheds the sling to free the metal arm, pulls the gun out of the duffel, and puts on the headgear, assuming the SHIELD team will be watching a live feed.

Barnes has run dozens of stealth missions in his time and never come close to being caught. As often as not, he wasn’t even spotted after he made the kill shot. And here in Jurassic World, the enemy is unlikely to be on guard, not if they’re so convinced they can pull off this harvest that they’re willing to move in broad daylight. He’s hoping for a walk in the park, pun intended. But of course he should know better than to think he has that kind of luck. As soon as the wall comes into view, he slows down, realizing that something is wrong. “Shit,” he says. “Skye, are you seeing this?”

Her voice is tinny in the earbud. “The part where a fifteen-foot-tall gate is smashed clear out of the wall? It’s kind of hard to miss. Bucky, I’m starting to think maybe this isn’t just a diversion.”

“You don’t say.” Assuming nobody’s seen the Hulk on Isla Nublar, there’s only one explanation. “Fitz, do you have any idea what kind of dinosaur could do that kind of damage?”

“I would have to say the very big kind,” says Fitz.

Thanks, team. So helpful.

“Bucky, I really think you should get out of there,” says Skye.

“Is there anything on your radar near my location? Human or dinosaur?”

“No, but—”

“Then I stay with the mission. What’s happening inside the restricted area?”

“Well, I don’t register any new, enormous, horrible dinosaurs,” Skye says, “but I’m only getting eight living velociraptors now. That’s… not so good. If they got out among the other dinosaurs, I can’t tell, but if there’s something in there killing velociraptors…”

“Or HYDRA’s already taken a handful,” Barnes points out. “And this destroyed gate is something they did. Or they were incompetent and panicked their target animal, got more than they bargained for. I’ve—” _Been the animal._ “—seen it happen.”

“That gate looks like it was torn up from this side,” says Coulson.

It does, and he knows the story doesn’t fit. His gut says something way beyond a HYDRA plot is wrong here, but there’s only one way to find out what. _Stay with the mission._

He goes in.


	10. Kids

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Even bigger spoilers for Jurassic World ahead if you haven't yet seen the movie.

“You’re closing in on the old park buildings,” Skye says in the earbud, “and I’ve still only got two humans in the area, just northeast of you. They’re in what looks like a garage behind the old visitors’ center.”

Barnes checks his weapons for the fifth time in twenty minutes: the M4, the one pistol he recovered after the fight with May, four knives in concealed sheaths. Not _enough_ knives, but he was only supposed to be playing tourist today and he didn’t want to go overboard. Still, those and the metal arm should be enough to take down any twelve non-enhanced fighters, so why does he feel hair prickling on the back of his neck? “Wildlife in the vicinity?”

“There are four feral raptors about a mile away and moving toward you, but nothing else nearby.”

“Alert me if that changes. I’m going in.”

Barnes inspects what used to be the Jurassic Park visitors’ center. The building’s in reasonable shape, given that it’s been exposed to the elements in the tropics for twenty years without repairs. He goes in low, out of sight, then up the wall to the roof, then across, setting his feet carefully—he’s glad he overruled Skye’s protests that he didn’t look touristy enough and wore his good boots anyway. From above the bay, he can hear two voices and some thumping and clanking noises. There’s a click, and a buzz, and then a frustrated growl and a rubbery sound that could be a shoe kicking a tire.

“Okay,” says one of the voices. “Just put it down over there. We’ll give it a minute before we try again.”

“What makes you think it’s gonna work better in a minute?” says the second voice, and Barnes goes cold.

He can’t be right. He just can’t be. He needs visual confirmation. He grips the top of the doorframe with the metal hand and leans over the edge, hanging his head down for an upside-down view of the garage bay.

“это пиздец,” he breathes, at the same time as he hears a gasp from Skye.

They’re not HYDRA at all. They’re _kids_. And they have no idea a pack of velociraptors is bearing down on them.

 

Barnes jerks his body back onto the garage roof while Skye is going crazy in the earbud. “Bucky, are those _kids?_ What are they—why are—”

“Where are the raptors?” he hisses.

“Closer. Maybe half a mile now. What are you going to do?”

“What do you think?” Barnes switches the M4’s firing mode to a three-round burst, flattens himself on the roof with the butt of the gun braced against his shoulder, and readies for combat _._

The brush is thick and heavy, and these raptors are born to it. He lets his eyes range across the landscape, waiting for an obvious movement, and is rewarded when the first head pops up out of the tall grass. Barnes has made kill shots from twice as far. He centers his aim and squeezes the trigger.

The raptor’s brain explodes.

The M4 has a suppressor, but the rapid-fire pops are still audible, and the sound from below stops abruptly. “Zach, do you hear that?” says the younger of the voices, but Barnes isn’t worrying about it. The rest of the raptors have snapped up, on alert, and this is not a fair fight for them. _Pop-pop-pop_ and the second one flies backward, _pop-pop-pop_ and the third goes down thrashing, and the fourth one puts on an unprecedented display of common sense and ducks low to run, but he nails it in the flank and when its body is thrown sideways, he puts another burst of fire where he assumes its heart is.

He must be right, because there’s no more movement in the brush, and Skye also lets out a breath. “I think you’re clear,” she says. “They’re not moving on the scan.”

Good. Because now that the kids are safe, Barnes is furious. He slings the M4 over his shoulder, flips himself down over the edge of the roof (only getting more pissed off when he lands harder than he means to on the wounded leg), pushes back the goggles, and strides into the open garage bay to demand, “What the ever-loving fuck do you morons think you’re doing out here?”

The kids must’ve heard him stomping across the roof, but they both jump six feet when they see him, and the older of the two—the lanky one with the dark hair—shoves the smaller, fairer one behind him. Oh, great, because that doesn’t bring up any associations. “Get away from my brother,” he says.

This kid clearly has more balls than brains. “How the hell did you two get in the restricted area? No, you know what? I don’t care. _Why_ the hell are you in the restricted area? Do you have any idea how dangerous it is to be here?”

“We were in a gyrosphere,” says the littler kid. “But we got chased by a really big dinosaur, like, bigger than a T-Rex big, and it smashed up the gyrosphere and we had to jump off a cliff to get away—”

“Stop it, Gray,” says the bigger kid, who, by process of elimination, must be Zach. “We don’t know who this guy is. Don’t tell him anything.”

All right, maybe not _so_ stupid. Barnes puts a finger up to the earbud and says, “Base, do you have any way to evac two civilians?”

“We could send a quinjet,” Skye begins.

“It’ll blow his cover,” says May. She must be getting some dirty looks, because she adds, “I’m not saying we shouldn’t get those kids out, but it won’t be subtle.” 

“She’s right,” Barnes agrees. If a SHIELD plane blasts in, every HYDRA operative on Isla Nublar will vanish, including Wu. His eyes scan around the garage bay, taking in the scene he interrupted, and he says, “Standby.” To the kids, he says, “Are you little assholes actually trying to start a twenty-year-old Jeep by yourselves?”

“We’ve fixed up old cars before,” Zach says, defensively.

“Yeah, I bet you have, with a couple hundred bucks’ worth of new parts. A jump start won’t do it.” He crosses to the car and makes a quick inspection under the hood. “Jesus, Mary, and Joseph. Radiator hose is rotten, tires are rotten, gas is probably rotten, no coolant, no oil, and some animal built a nest in here. If you somehow did get it started, you’d burn out the engine in the first klick. You, Zach—” A metal hand is as good as a garage full of power tools for taking engines apart. He tosses the radiator hose at the kid and says, “Check around and see if you can find one of these in better shape, either in another car or in storage. Gray—” Who names their kid Gray? “—See if you can find any full gas cans, especially ones that say _marine_ or anything about fuel stabilizer. …Well? What are you two waiting for? Do you want to get eaten? Go!”

The kids look at each other once, then look back at him, then scurry off to get started. As soon as they’re out of earshot, Coulson, who’s been quiet so far, says, “Can you get them out of there safely, Barnes?”

Barnes is skimming through the junk on the shelves. His metal fingers curl around a can: Fix-A-Flat. Good. He’ll shore up the best of the old tires with that and hope it’s enough. “If I can’t start this Jeep, I’ll walk out with them, but I’d rather put the little bastards in a vehicle that might outrun at least some of the wildlife. I’m not thrilled about this ‘really big dinosaur’ Gray mentioned.”

“Skye doesn’t see anything larger than a raptor in the area,” Coulson says. “The boy could be exaggerating. And, Barnes, tone down the language. They’re children.”

This guy. He’s a regular Steve Rogers Junior. _“Mon Dieu, j'en ai rien à foutre,”_ Barnes says, just to mix things up. It would be a disservice to his old buddy Dernier if he let his French get rusty.

“How do you know how to do all this?” Skye asks.

“Haven’t been a soldier my whole life,” Barnes says, kneeling beside the first tire. “My family had a car. Bought it in the Twenties when times were good, kept it running with spit and baling wire through the Depression.” He’d had an eye on buying a car of his own, when he finally got steady work and started doing all right for himself. Even picked out the one he wanted: 1941 Studebaker Champion, Alpine Blue. Old Bucky Barnes had big plans for taking dames out on the town in that car, before Pearl Harbor changed everything. “They’ve added some bells and whistles since then, but a combustion engine’s still a combustion engine.”

“Who are you talking to?” Gray asks. He’s come back to the bay lugging a gas can, which he sets down in front of Barnes like a prize.

“Park security office,” Barnes says without hesitation.

“Can you call my aunt Claire? She works for the park too.”

“No.”

“If you work for the park, how come you don’t have a uniform?”

“It was supposed to be my day off.”

“How come you have an arm made out of metal?”

“I don’t. This is a special glove for working on cars,” Barnes says, mostly to see how blatantly he can lie and get away with it.

“How come you got that but you didn’t get your uniform?”

How do kids manage to be too smart for their own good and too stupid to avoid getting lost in a dinosaur-filled jungle at the same time? “How about you shut your trap and let me work, kid?”

“Don’t talk to my brother like that,” says the bigger kid, who’s just come back with a less battered radiator hose.

 _Give me strength._ “Tell me about this really big dinosaur,” he says. Maybe Skye and Fitz will listen in and figure out what he’s up against out here, and maybe he can tune the kid out and get some work done.

It works, sort of. Gray seems to have one of those brains that’s always in record-and-analyze mode, which is a lot less annoying when his observational skills aren’t trained on Barnes. Zach doesn’t trust him— _still smart, kid_ —but he gradually stops avoiding Barnes and makes himself useful, locating tools and parts and even offering some good suggestions. Barnes loses track of the time he spends working, but when he finally slides out from under the car, with engine grease on his face and reeking of coolant and oil, he feels pretty good about their chances. “Okay,” he tells Zach, “bring that charger back over,” just as Skye says in his ear, “Bucky, you got a couple dilophosaurs approaching.”

Of course. “The ones with the frills and the spitting, right?”

“Yeah. They just stopped about a mile northeast. Maybe they’re feeding on something, but—”

“But that’s too close for comfort.” Gray is across the bay, poking through old bottles and cans, probably in imminent danger of tetanus. How does Barnes keep winding up protecting hapless kids? He turns to Zach, approaching with the charger, and says, “Something came up that I’m going to check out. If you can get this car started, put your brother in it and go straight back to the park, okay? Driving the car like this will probably destroy it, but it only has to get you to safety, so don’t stop unless it dies on you. And about your little brother—”

“I know what to do.” Zach looks at Barnes with unexpected sincerity. “I’ll keep him safe, no matter what.” He pauses. “You got any brothers?”

 _In every way that matters._ “I got one.”

“You ever let him down?”

Couldn’t this kid ask any other question but that? Barnes’ expression must answer for him, because Zach says, miserably, “It’s my fault Gray’s out here in the first place. I’m not gonna let him down again.”

“Hey,” Barnes says, “it’s okay to screw up sometimes. You just gotta make it right as best you can, because when you have a brother, he’s with you till…” He can’t quite finish that thought, so he says, “Look, just be careful.” He picks up the M4 from the corner he propped it in, puts the goggles back on, and heads out.

Barnes is fifty paces from the garage when he hears the car fire up. At a hundred, he hears it peel out of the bay. Belatedly, he realizes he should’ve asked if the kid knew how to _drive_ the car. “Keep an eye on them, would you, Skye? If they get in trouble again, maybe call the real park security team?”

“You got it.”

“Thanks.” He should be glad to see the back of those kids, but he’s not enjoying the win. It’s not that he’s tired, exactly, not with the super-soldier metabolism, but he lacks the Asset’s relentlessness now. Without the kids’ safety to focus on, it’s harder to ignore his body’s nagging reminders that he’s hot and thirsty, and his leg still aches from the bad landing. Well, tough luck, because he’s got work to do. He’ll take care of these dinosaurs—he doesn’t love the idea of just putting them down any more than he did the raptors, but better that than take a chance on them pursuing him or the kids—and head to the monorail. Then he can ride back to the park and reward himself with a cold beer, like he used to do after a hot day in the garage in the old days.

He hears noise before he approaches the site, that weird reptile roar that sounds like nothing else he’s encountered. The dilophosaurs didn’t seem big enough to make a noise like that. Hey, maybe they’re fighting amongst themselves. He’ll stay behind the tree line and scope out the situation so that…

Barnes stops abruptly, because there aren’t two dinosaurs in the clearing ahead of him. There are three. Two are dilophosaurs: one dead on the ground, the other dangling from the jaws of a… What in God’s name _is_ the third thing? It’s a pale gray-green color, nothing like the other dinosaurs in the park. It’s upright like a T. Rex, but its arms aren’t short and useless; they end in hooked claws longer than his hand. Its head and back are crested with spines. Its jaw looks twice as wide as a T. Rex’s, and its teeth… Barnes has wrapped his head around most of the other dinosaurs in the park, but the _number_ of teeth on this one is… What is it? This is like nothing he’s ever seen before, living, fossil, or otherwise.

It turns its massive head and looks straight at him.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Bucky Barnes: fixing cars and plot holes since 1933. 
> 
> (Actually, the consensus of the car folks I've talked to about Jurassic World is that the kids _might_ have been able to get the Jeep started with enough luck, but if you have that kind of luck, you're probably not stranded in hungry dinosaur territory to begin with.)


	11. Indominus Rex

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warning for an Old Yeller moment at the very end. :'(

Barnes runs.

Because being a badass is great when your training and experience and your metal fucking arm make you the scariest bastard in the room, but when you’ve just raised your gun and sprayed bullets at a dinosaur and all you’ve done is piss it off, running is the smart move.

_What the fuck, HYDRA? Who builds a dinosaur and thinks, “You know what would make this better? If it was fuckin’ bulletproof!”_

So now he’s got Skye screaming in the earbud and a twelve-meter monster chasing him and his best bet is to run like hell into the trees and then, when it’s close behind him, to throw himself into a slide, hooking his metal fingers against a tree root to swing his body sideways. The jaws open and he gets a face full of hot, rank dinosaur breath, but the guess he risked his life on was right: with that much mass behind it, it can’t corner worth a damn. It’s still turning, crashing into the surrounding trees, when he brings the gun up with his right hand and squeezes off a four-second burst of fire. He sees bullets strike, but the rounds that would punch through human flesh just lodge in its hide or bounce off ridges of bone. Blood drips from the side of its head, but not nearly enough blood to slow it down.

The monster lashes its tail and slaps the nearest tree hard enough to send shivers up the branches, and Barnes is up on his feet again and running faster than he has since his Army days, the weight of the metal arm be damned. He races deeper into the woods, running in a Z to make it keep changing course, trying to keep it from reaching top speed for as long as he can. He doesn’t have a prayer of outrunning it; he’s just buying time to figure out what to do. Stand his ground and open fire until he punches through that thick hide? Keep dodging and try to lead it into some kind of trap? _Come on,_ идиот _, what would the Asset do_?

Oh, who’s he kidding? The Asset would have a six-man team on standby, at least two nifty little explosive devices on his belt, and probably a grenade launcher.

The dinosaur is briefly wedged between two trees, and he uses those precious seconds to line up another shot. He aims for the eye, but as good as he is, he’s trying to hit a moving target at a steep upward angle, so he’s not surprised when the bullet goes wild. Then it wrenches itself free and comes crashing after him again. “What the hell, Skye?” he yells, ducking to the side as a clawed foreleg swipes at him.

“I don’t know what it is! It didn’t show up on the scans! It’s not anything I’ve ever seen before!” Skye sounds beside herself. “Bucky, get out of there!”

That’s what he’s trying to do, and he’d tell her so, but he needs all his breath to run. His endurance is pretty great, but even he can’t keep up this pace for long, and the thing is gaining, so he’d better come up with something fast.

And all of a sudden, in his head, the ghost of Jim Morita says, _Hey, Barnes, are you_ ever _gonna learn how to use the terrain?_

Desperate times call for desperate measures. He’s at the top of a ridge that ends in a steep grade, and as the dinosaur charges up, he throws his body sideways and backward, narrowly avoiding a stomp from a massive hind limb. Once again, the monster can’t turn fast enough. Its inertia makes it overshoot and it starts to slip down the other side of the ridge, scrabbling for purchase with those evil-looking claws. Barnes goes into an uncontrolled slide down the other side of the ridge, through brush and mud and with his luck, probably dinosaur shit, but in the couple of seconds before the thing’s claws finds purchase and it charges back up, he lands in a shallow creek bed and rolls into partial cover under a patch of thick, snaky roots. He twists his body so the gun is facing outward and presses his back into a nearly vertical wall of mud and rocks, where he freezes, his breath coming in short, sharp bursts.

 _Oh, very clever indeed, James,_ says the voice of Monty Falsworth. _Except that some creatures hunt by scent as well as sight._

Smart this dinosaur might be, but it’s confused by the fact that it’s lost him, and confusion makes it angry. He can hear it on the ridge above him, stomping back and forth, looking for him. It lets out a bellow, and the soft mammal part of his brain squeezes his eyes shut and _no, not now, please not now,_ he feels the panic rising in his chest, the familiar tremor through his good shoulder and down his spine, and he fights it, but the dinosaur is still up there and it does the roar again and his heart is racing, he can’t think, he can’t _breathe_ …

 _Yeah, you got it rough, Jimmy Boy,_ Dum Dum Dugan says at his ear. _Nobody’s denying that. But I thought you said you wanted to see your buddy Steve again. Hold it together a little longer, and who knows, you might get your wish. Lose it, and you’re done for._

Steve. Yeah, if he loses his cool and breaks cover, he’ll never get to explain any of the last seventy years to Steve, and Steve will spend the rest of his life wondering and probably blaming himself for it. So he needs to ride this out quietly, for Steve’s sake.

The monster is walking up and down the ridgeline, making wet reptile snuffling sounds. Barnes lies still, breathing shallow. Every time the dinosaur takes a step, he feels vibrations through the earth at his back. It can’t see him, and the gas and oil and mud and whatever else is on him must be confusing it, if it does hunt by smell. So it’s making a lot of noise up there, trying to flush him out. Every so often it bellows, and his left hand clenches so hard that he wonders if the metal fingers can break after all. And then, after he’s spent several minutes convinced that he can’t stand this for another second, suddenly the sound changes. It’s not stomping and snuffling anymore; it’s silent, and Barnes thinks, _listening._ He holds his breath. Then he hears it too: it’s too far away to make out, but it’s a human voice, raised in what sounds like anger or frustration, and another human voice answering it.

Oh, boy. Are these more hapless civilians who’ve wandered into the restricted zone, or a HYDRA team? Either way, it changes the situation, because now it’s not just his own survival on the line anymore.

Barnes wishes he could be the kind of person Steve would be here, the one who’d charge in and save whoever else has wandered into this fucked-up situation, HYDRA or no. But he’s not Steve. Hell, he’s not even the guy Steve thinks he is, if the damn Smithsonian exhibit is any indication. Going on and on about him giving his life in the line of duty, as if it was something he did instead of something that was done _to_ him. Barnes has never been in the business of making noble sacrifices. He’s in the business of trying to take down those HYDRA bastards so they can never strap him or anybody else down on a table again, and he’ll never finish the job he started in 1943 if he chooses this moment to play the hero.

He keeps silent.

The monster stands stock still for a moment, and then it lets out one final snort and goes slinking off through the woods, in the direction of voices and the old visitors’ center.

Well, whoever they are, he hopes they’re smarter than he is and brought a team. A large team. With rocket launchers. And a couple of Hueys. And Thor.

He stays still for another ninety seconds before he lets himself move. First he takes off the goggles; they’re busted anyway, lens shattered, side-mount camera hanging by a frayed wire. Next he has to crawl out of cover and stand up, which is harder than it should be. The stupid tourist clothes offered none of the protection he’s used to, and his whole body feels bruised and scraped. Putting weight on the injured leg is the worst part; there’s blood seeping through his jeans, and he wonders how many of those little surgical staples he’s torn. Once he’s up, he rakes his sweaty hair out of his eyes and makes a token attempt at brushing the mud, leaves, and spiderwebs off himself, but it’s a lost cause and he knows it. Forget the cold beer; when he gets back to the park, his first priority is a shower.

_Aww, you get some mud on your boots, city boy?_

“Oh, shove it, Dugan, I know you were born in Beantown,” Barnes mutters, with as much New York scorn as he can muster. Of course Dugan isn’t really there, any more than the others were. But the things he heard, they’re real memories—Morita reminding him to move to higher ground; Falsworth laughing at him for instinctively ducking out of sight when he spotted a wolf on patrol; Dugan holding him back when he was about to snap and punch a guard in Schmidt’s prison. He’s glad the Commandos were what came to his mind for once, not Russian curses or tactical schematics. Memories that belong to Bucky Barnes, not holdovers from the Asset days.

Jesus. Did he just say he was happy to have voices in his head? Maybe he should stop fighting it. The way things are going, losing his mind might be a relief.

Apparently the SHIELD team hears him talking to himself, too, because the earbud, which somebody must’ve muted when they realized he was hiding, crackles to life again. “Barnes, where are you right now?” Coulson says, in a tone so sharp that Barnes knows he’s not referring to physical location.

He answers as if that was the question anyway, speaking in his lowest tone. “Hiking out. Going radio silent. Thing has good hearing.”

“Don’t you dare. May’s on her way to you, but we need to debr—”

Barnes reaches up and switches off the earbud, because he’s not in the mood for orders, or psychoanalysis, or a pep talk. He just wants a couple minutes of quiet while he hoofs it toward the broken gate, navigating by the sun and the compass the Army trained into his head.

That thing.The monster. What was it? It’s like a T. Rex and a velociraptor and some other spiny bastard dinosaur all wrapped up into one. And knowing how Wu works, it could be exactly that. Doesn’t explain why it didn’t show up on Skye’s scanner, but Wu could’ve deliberately designed something that wouldn’t register on infrared. Hell, Wu might’ve thrown that in just for shits and giggles.

Barnes finds further confirmation that the monster dinosaur was engineered to be an evil сволочьь when a new noise in the woods gets his attention. It’s not a dinosaur or a human; it’s a weird chirping sound, like a flock of birds, but subtly different in a way he can’t pinpoint. The last thing he needs is to make his trudge back to the park even longer, but the sound troubles him, so he detours toward it, then stops at the top of a rise, looking at the scene below him in disbelief.

Of course it has to be a stegosaurus down there, with its belly torn open, green and brown hide splotched with blood. It’s still moving, rolling its head from side to side and kicking weakly with a hind limb, but more than a dozen tiny, almost fragile-looking dinosaurs—something with a c, he thinks; sounds like compass, maybe?—are darting in and out, tugging at the animal’s guts like carrion birds. Busy with their meal, they disregard Barnes until he jerks the gun up and blasts a line of bullets at the ground. Then they leap back into the brush in a flurry of those weird chirps, and he strides forward, putting slugs into two more of them before the rest finally scatter.

It’s not fair of him to do that, and he knows it. They’re carrion animals, doing what carrion animals do. This isn’t their fault. It’s the fault of the monster dinosaur that found a placid herbivore just having a nice meal and minding its own business, and ripped it wide open for no good reason at all. Didn’t even bother to feed, just left its victim to die in what has to be excruciating pain, being slowly devoured.

No. It’s the fault of the person who _made_ the monster. He should know that better than anyone.

Barnes hears his metal arm clench and whirr as the hand shapes itself into a fist, gearing up for one of those bone-shattering punches. He turns around and slams it into a tree trunk, proving that the monster dinosaur isn’t the only thing that can make the trees in this forest shake all the way up to their branches. It’s stupid, a pointless gesture that will alert everything nearby to his presence, but the blind rage he feels right now is something he hasn’t felt since he was the Asset, fighting a stubborn, insistent, obviously crazy mission target on the helicarrier.

Barnes knows what he has to do next; he just really, really doesn’t want to do it. He walks up to the stegosaurus and rests his hand on the side of its head. “ _Merde_ , buddy, I’m sorry about this,” he says softly, as he rests the barrel of the M4 behind its rolling yellow eye, turns his face away, and pulls the trigger.

The carrion eaters will be back in a minute, but as Barnes turns back to his path toward the gate, he hopes that at least he’s managed to stop one living thing needlessly suffering because of HYDRA today.

He hopes the people he heard earlier were HYDRA, and that the monster dinosaur has eaten them and choked to death on their bones.

He hopes the damn monster dinosaur isn’t sneaking up behind him right now.

He hopes he can get his metal hand around Henry Wu’s throat before this is over.


	12. Allies

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Let's have some nice little character moments before Bucky's life gets ruined for the sixth or seventh time this week.  
> Special credit to [tigrislilium](http://archiveofourown.org/users/tigrislilium/pseuds/tigrislilium) for a line that I shamelessly stole from a comment.

Melinda May is comfortable with silence in a way most people aren’t, which is good, because Barnes is in no mood to talk when he meets up with her at the gate. She gives him a bottle of some sports drink—it’s electric blue and looks disgusting, but it’s liquid, so he chugs it—and asks if he can walk, and when he nods, she shepherds him back to the monorail platform. He doesn’t know how May expects to get a filthy, bleeding guy with a metal arm and a semiautomatic onto the train without some very awkward questions, but just as they arrive, an empty car pulls up and the doors open without a park attendant in sight. “Skye?” he asks, and May nods.

“It’s her way of apologizing to you. I’ve learned to just go with it.”

He drops into one of the seats and closes his eyes as a blast of cool air hits him from an overhead vent. God, it feels good to get out of the heat. “Apologizing for what?”

“Not seeing the I. Rex on the scan and warning you. She thinks you’ll never forgive her.”

He has too many questions about that statement to articulate, the biggest one being _why does a cute little SHIELD hacker care what a 98-year-old definitely brain-damaged maybe not-so-ex-assassin thinks of her,_ but it’s easier to say, “The hell’s an I. Rex?”

“The dinosaur you ran into. Skye got into Wu’s files and realized that was his big secret project. He did plan to weaponize it—you were right about that. But the funding to create it came from Masrani, not from HYDRA. Masrani actually seemed to think he could display it as a park attraction. The name they’ve been using for it is Indominus Rex.”

“That’s the stupidest name I’ve ever heard.”

“…said Bucky Barnes.”

He opens his eyes. “Hey!”

She’s smirking at him, and the weird thing is, it’s _great._ Having people around who are so not-scared of him that they’re willing to mess with him, that’s a thing he never thought he’d have again. Not to mention that all those years sharpening his tongue on Steve are just wasted if he doesn’t have anybody to mouth off at.

 “Do you want me to take a look at your leg?” she asks. Seeing him hesitate, she adds, “I won’t hurt you.”

That’s pretty much the opposite of what Barnes is worried about. But this is where Steve, speak of the devil, would say that part of working with a team is knowing when to accept help, and Steve would be, well, a hypocrite and kind of an asshole, but he’d also be right. “Warn me what you’re gonna do,” he says. “I wouldn’t want to… get startled and…” He sighs. He knows five languages; why is it so hard to find words? “Better safe than sorry.”

May gives him another of those assessing looks, as if she’s rethinking him for the fourth or fifth time since they met. “First, I’m going to get the knife out of your boot and cut those jeans. Is that all right?”

“I’m, uh, gonna give you the rest of them, too. Just in case.”

He doesn’t know why she looks so surprised when he turns them over. It’s not _that_ many knives.

When all the weapons, including the gun, are at a safe distance, Barnes puts his leg up on the train seat and hooks his metal hand around a rail. He winces when May slits the denim up to the knee, but not because of the proximity of the blade. Clothes are disposable in this century, and these in particular are a lost cause, but he can’t help thinking of all the times he and Steve came home scuffed and bloody after some fight and his mother gave him the old “I’m not angry, I’m just disappointed” look—always him, not Steve; oh no, little Stevie could do no wrong, but Bucky was supposed to _know better_ —and took their clothes away to wash and mend them, because even if she was up all night, no child of hers was going out the door looking shabby the next morning. Mom guilt: eighty-five years later, it’s a gift that keeps on giving.

And yeah, the leg is about as ugly as he figured. Even with his metabolism, a couple days aren’t enough to heal a deep wound, and now he’s opened it again and torn out half a dozen of those little staples doing it. “The kids, Zach and Gray,” he says, to distract himself while May cleans up the gash. “Did they make it out?”

“They’re fine. They’re headed back to the park. Would have been back already if the older kid didn’t keep getting confused about which direction south is, but they’re out of danger.”

“There were some other people out here…”

“We know. Your friend Grady was one of them, and the other was the park operations manager, a woman named Dearing. They had a run-in with the I. Rex too, but it looks like they came out of it better than you did.”

“I softened it up for them.”

“Mm-hm. You know, you shouldn’t be walking around on this kind of injury.”

“I can keep going with a lot worse than this.”

“That doesn’t mean you should. You can let us finish the job and bring Wu in.”

“No, I can’t.”

“This is personal for you. I get that. So does Coulson, but he… we want you to be careful.”

One of these days, Barnes thinks, he’s going to stop being surprised when people say things like that. Not because he’s done what they wanted, and not because they know that after they’ve withheld it for so long, meting out a little basic human decency will bring him back under their control better than any drug, but because they see something good in him, whatever it is, and are on his side. If he can start accepting kindness from the SHIELD team, then maybe he’ll be ready to talk to Steve. Maybe.

“Hey, May,” he says, because even if it’s the wrong language, he has the words now: _“je vous remercie_ _.”_

He’s expecting to have to translate, but she just shrugs and says, _"Avec plaisir,”_ because, like him, she’s full of surprises.

 

The monorail stops in an enclosure under the hotel, and they take the service elevator up. May walks on his left side so his arm and the gun are both partly concealed, but the hotel halls are almost empty and they make it back to his room without frightening any civilians. May agrees a little too pointedly that a shower wouldn’t kill him, so he does his best to use up all the hot water on the island, even though it stings like hell wherever his skin is scraped. Which is way too much of it. That’s it; he’s officially spending the rest of his days in high-end tac gear right down to his underwear if he has any choice about it.

He comes out of the bathroom with a towel wrapped around his waist, and finds May by the window doing something that looks tai chi-ish and Skye on the bed, working on the ever-present laptop. Skye looks up, about to speak, and then keeps looking for several seconds before she says, quietly, “Whoa.”

“Yeah, you run around in the jungle for five hours and give yourself road rash, and see how you look,” he says wearily, raking his hand through his soaked hair.

“That’s not the sentiment she was going for, Barnes,” May says, without breaking her pattern.

Jesus. When he said he’d never understand women if he lived to be a hundred, he didn’t mean it to be prophetic _._

“Yeah, um. Bucky,” Skye says, “about the I. Rex, I figured it out. It didn’t show up on the scan because—”

“Give me your hair tie,” Barnes says.

“What?”

“You think you owe me something for not warning me about a dinosaur in a park full of dinosaurs? Fine. Give me your hair tie, right now, and we’ll call it even.”

Baffled, she pulls the elastic band out of her hair and holds it out to him, and he gathers his hair in a loose tail and loops the band around it twice. That’s so much better. He should’ve thought of it days ago. “Okay, show’s over. Get out and let me get dressed.”

“Can’t stop now, I’m working on tapping into the control room,” Skye says. “Relax, we won’t look.”

“Uh-huh. Because I learned nothing from growing up with three sisters. Both of you get out.”

In the end he doesn’t quite go for full tac, but long sleeves and pants aren’t really optional if he doesn’t want to look like he belongs in a hospital, so he’ll just have to swelter. He’s pulling the glove over the metal hand when there’s a sudden pounding on the hotel room door and Skye yelling, “Bucky, open up, you gotta see this right now!”

Дерьмо, now what? He opens the door and Skye practically throws the laptop at him. “Security camera over the aviary,” she says.

Barnes stares at it for several seconds before his brain will even begin to translate what he’s seeing. Then he says, “Aw, no. No, no, no, no, no, no, _no.”_

Given everything, and making allowances for some legitimately awful shit in his life, Barnes likes to think he doesn’t spend all that much time on self-pity. That he knows it’s a man’s job to make the best of whatever situation he’s in, and a certain amount of bitching about it is fine, but at the end of the day, you’re better off fixing what you can than wasting your time wishing things were different. But seriously? _Seriously?_ Even HYDRA doesn’t normally fuck things up as badly as this.

There’s a flock of fucking flying dinosaurs heading straight toward the center of the park.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ...I might be a little obsessed with making Bucky take showers.
> 
> I regret nothing.


	13. The Petting Zoo

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Many thanks to [ehcanuck](http://archiveofourown.org/users/ehcanuck/pseuds/ehcanuck) for improving my French.
> 
> Also, I know that pteranodons and dimorphodons are pterosaurs, not dinosaurs. Bucky does too, but he’s willfully ignoring it because he wants to say he fought flying Nazi dinosaurs. Can you blame him?

Until this moment, Barnes has paid very little attention to the flying creatures of Jurassic World because he figured they were irrelevant to his mission. Everybody has drones now for aerial work, and drones don’t need feeding or training or cleaning up after. HYDRA only sends a special asset into the field if they need a skilled operative or if they’re going for shock and awe; he didn’t figure flying dinosaurs would suit either of those purposes. Now that he sees a flock of three or four dozen of the bastards about to descend on a park full of civilians, he thinks maybe he underestimated their potential for the second part.

“How the fuck did _this_ happen?” he asks, shoving the laptop back into Skye’s hands and crossing the room in two strides to start grabbing things off the dresser.

“I got into the control room computers right in the middle of it. They sent a helicopter out to look for the I. Rex, but something happened and it crashed into the aviary,” Skye says, in a rush. “They’re saying a couple people are dead. They’re—Bucky, what are you doing?”

He’s just grabbed a gun, loaded his pockets with spare clips, pulled the tactical vest over his shirt, and is heading toward the balcony. He stares at her. “Going out for a beer, what’s it look like?”

“They’re gonna think you’re a crazy person and shoot you if you go out like that!”

She makes a good point. Redemptive heroics don’t have to include dodging friendly fire. Barnes’ eyes scan around the room and he spots the jacket May got him for when they talked to Grady. It’s dark blue and has the InGen logo and SECURITY printed on the breast and back. He pulls it on. “There. I’m official,” he says, and opens the door to the balcony.

Skye doesn’t realize what he’s doing until it’s too late. “Bucky, no!” she cries, making a grab for his arm.

“Bucky _yes,”_ he says, and grins at her as he drops over the railing.

His room at the hotel is on the third floor, too high to just jump—well, unless you’re a certain idiot with a red, white, and blue shield who just _loves_ jumping off stuff—but he scoped out all the escape routes on his first night at the hotel, and swinging down to the next balcony, then dropping to the ground, is the fastest way to the street. This time he remembers to account for his injured leg and sticks the landing, severely startling a handful of tourists who are milling around on the sidewalk. He points the gun at the ground and starts moving, and a couple of people do shriek and scatter, but the commotion is already starting at the north end of the park’s main drag and people suddenly have a much bigger thing to notice than a lone guy with a gun.

Civilians. They hear screaming and half of them go _toward_ the noise. Some of them even get their cell phones out and start taking video. And then the flying dinosaurs start swooping down and they realize this isn’t part of some show, and they panic and run. Barnes actually has to shove a few people out of the way with the metal arm to make it the last ten yards to the petting paddock.

If Alisha hadn’t earned his respect already, she’d have it now, because she isn’t panicking. In fact, she’s behaving with more composure than a lot of the parents, who are grabbing their children and starting to run right out into the street, where there’s no cover at all. Alisha has gathered up the handful of kids who haven’t been claimed and is herding them toward the only shelter within the paddock: a couple of fake-looking concrete caves, probably there to isolate any juveniles that get stressed out by shrieky kids. He vaults over the fence, pushing off with the metal hand. “Good work, Alisha!” he shouts, to be heard over the kids—several of whom have already started to wail—and the juvenile dinosaurs—most of which are also making lowing or trumpeting sounds in their fright.

Seeing the gun, she lets out her own shriek and jumps in front of the kids before she realizes what’s happening, but then she looks at him and her mouth falls open. “You—you’re the guy—”

“Keep those kids under the shelter and get your friends there—” Barnes cocks his head toward the other two park attendants, both about Alisha’s age and also doing their best to herd the littlest kids under the shelters. “—to grab some nets or poles or something, anything that can keep those things away from the kids. Do you have a contingency in case one of the animals gets worked up?”

“We, we have electric cattle prod things for emergencies, but we’ve never had to—”

“Get them. Run. I’ll cover you.”

She takes off toward a storage shed and he goes down on his right knee on the dirt floor of the paddock, bracing the gun against his left shoulder just as the first of the dinosaurs swoops down.

Thanks to Scott, the kid who wouldn’t shut up on the gyroscope ride, there are a couple of things Barnes knows for sure about the flying dinosaurs of Jurassic World. He knows that there are two kinds, pteranodons and dimorphodons. Dimorphodons are about two meters long, with heads that look too big for their bodies, like pelicans, except that they also have mouths full of sharp teeth. Pteranadons are closer to seven or eight meters and have long, cruel-looking curved beaks. Dimorphodons are nothing to screw around with, but the pteranodons are such nasty, aggressive assholes that they can only be seen in the aviary through thick mesh screens for fear they’ll maim a park visitor.

Barnes is also no expert on birds, but he’s seen how owls and hawks hunt, and he figures the flying monsters will seek out the smallest, most vulnerable creatures in the park for prey.

Barnes puts a bullet in the first pteranodon that swoops over the paddock, and it drops to the dirt. Its wings are still thrashing, and one of the small triceratops squeals in alarm—that’s a sound Barnes never needs to hear again—which panics the other juveniles, and suddenly the whole place is chaos. Somehow he squeezes off a few more shots, two of which actually down the targets, and he’s making a run for the caves when one of the fuckers comes in for a dive bomb and swipes a claw-tipped wing at his head. He rolls out of the way and a second later, it’s twitching on the ground and Alisha is standing over him, holding a three-foot-long device that looks like a cattle prod on steroids.

Good, so those things work and not _everybody_ who had a hand in designing the safety measures for this park was a complete idiot. He finishes the pteranodon with a headshot and grabs Alisha’s arm, pulling her toward the concrete caves. “Stand here,” he instructs. “Anything comes near you, steer it away from the cave. Don’t worry about me, just look after yourself and the kids. Got it?”

“Y-yeah.”

He fires at a swooping dimorphodon and it plummets to the concrete outside the enclosure, and then suddenly there’s another burst of gunfire, off to his left somewhere. He instinctively ducks, but it’s not directed at him.He looks up in time to see another couple of pteranodons fall out of the sky, on the other side of the street—that’s where real park security has set up, presumably. Okay. He swings himself up onto the roof of the fake caves, steadies himself into the best firing stance he can get on the uneven concrete, and picks off another dimorphodon, so the scores stands at Barnes, six; dinosaurs, zero.

He hears a humming sound and a crackle; Alisha or one of her friends must have fired their cattle prod. Good. Now that he knows they’re able to put up a fight, his job is a lot easier. _Pop_ and another one goes spiraling down to the pavement, _pop_ and there goes number eight, and he’s settling into the familiar rhythm of sniping now, all the chaos and screaming receding, nothing in the world but him and a sky full of targets.

Naturally, the moment he gets cocky is the moment everything goes to shit, because he’s lining up a perfect shot on a pteranodon that’s flying straight toward him when another one comes up behind and he can’t turn fast enough to stop it from digging its talons into the tactical vest.

Barnes is not small, and the pteranodons, for all their huge wingspans, have light bones. It might be able to lift somebody with a slight build, but not him. Still, its bird feet end in wicked curved claws, just like the velociraptors, and the leathery wings flapping crazily to either side of him give him a horrible moment of being surrounded, a flashback of hands shoving him into the cryo tank,and he loses his stance and goes flying, twisting in midair so that he lands with the pteranodon partly underneath him. The horrible wings are still battering around his face, and now he’s starting to get why bats freak people out. The gun is underneath him, but his right hand can reach a knife and he stabs behind him blindly, punches into something solid, and the dinosaur lets out a screech so loud it makes his ears ring, but the claws loosen their grip and he rolls away just as Alisha gives it a jolt from the cattle prod.

Barnes rolls to his feet, panting, and yells at her, “Get back in there, I told you not to worry about me,” and she yells back, “Screw that, Team Stegosaurus, you’re the kids’ best chance at getting out of this alive,” and _damn,_ if Coulson doesn’t get down here and recruit this girl for SHIELD tonight, he’ll want to know the reason why.

He points the gun at the sky again and takes out a couple more of the flying bastards, but the attack is slowing down now; between him and the park security team, it seems like the most aggressive animals are down and the others are starting to rethink their feeding frenzy and retreat. He picks off anything he can get a shot at until the sky is empty, and then he keeps his gun trained on the sky for another minute to be sure. Then he lowers the weapon and snaps on the safety before he looks around the paddock to take stock.

The little dinosaurs have mostly clustered in groups by species and are snorting and rearing at the edges of the enclosure, but none of them strikes him as panicky enough to be a threat. They’re giving the dead pteranodon a wide berth, so he grabs the thing by one wing and hauls it over into the corner furthest from the kids. No point traumatizing them any more than they already have been.

A lot of people must have gotten stuck somewhere or been unable to fight through the crowds to get back to the paddock, because as soon as the dinosaur attack is over, the place is swarmed with frantic parents reuniting with their kids. Barnes isn’t going anywhere near that scene; he’s way too out of practice with children, but he wants to wait and make sure nobody needs a medic—oh, yeah, including him. He ditches the InGen jacket, which is mostly shredded anyway. There are three long scores on either side of the tactical vest, but he’s actually come out of this little adventure with nothing bleeding. Hey, how about that? Sometimes he actually _does_ learn from his mistakes.

“You okay, Team Stegosaurus?” says Alisha, coming across the paddock to him. She’s just handed off the last of the kids to a parent and had the sense to get away right after. Good move. Barnes suspects there’s going to be an initial rush of relief that the little ones are okay and then they’ll start taking out their fear on the nearest park employees. “Oh my God,” Alisha says, when she sees the claw marks in the vest. “Did it hurt you?”

“I’m fine. Are all the kids okay?”

“Yeah, thanks to you, nothing got close to any of them. I don’t even think any of the calves got hurt, which is amazing.” She’s looking at him a lot more closely than he’d like. “So you _were_ from Corporate. I wondered. You were asking some pretty weird questions for a tourist.”

Oh, right, the jacket. “No, I’m not InGen. I’m… It’s not important. What will they do now?”

“I… I don’t know. Nothing like this ever happened before. Bring in helicopters and evacuate the people who got hurt to a hospital on the mainland, I guess. How did this even happen, though?”

Now that the danger’s past, it’s starting to hit her just how bad it was. She’s starting to wobble a little, and Barnes catches her without thinking. She leans against him, then looks down, realizes it’s his left hand against her back, and says, “Hey, I thought your arm was broken or something.”

“Or something. Look, I’ve gotta go, but you should probably get checked out. Make sure you’re not in shock or anything. That was pretty intense.”

“I think the emergency medical crew’s gonna be busy for a while,” she says, with a shaky laugh. “I’m really okay. Anyway, I need to go help get the little guys back in their pens, and that’s not gonna be easy.”

“I gotta go, too.” He hesitates, then holds out his right hand. “Hey, Alisha? Call me James.”

“James. Okay. James. Nice to meet you, James.” She shakes his hand, still looking a little dazed. Then her eyes go to the gun, and she says, “Look, whatever you’re doing here, be _careful_ , okay?”

Barnes nods solemnly, but as he turns away, he lets himself smile. In his professional opinion, Team Stegosaurus has just had a pretty big win.


	14. Shutdown

_Ladies and gentlemen, due to a state of emergency, all Jurassic World attractions are currently closed. Please remain calm and return to your hotel room. Tune your television to Channel 3 or access our website for further updates. If you are in need of medical attention, please report to one of our three state-of-the-art Urgent Care facilities conveniently located near the tram stops. Ladies and gentlemen, due to a state of emergency, all Jurassic World attractions are currently closed..._

Barnes stops listening after the announcement on the loudspeakers goes into a loop. At least there seems to be a plan in place to deal with a disaster on Isla Nublar, and this definitely qualifies as a disaster. The street is littered with the bodies of flying creatures and the junk people discarded while fleeing from them—sunglasses, hats, the occasional tipped-over empty stroller—and the tourists who haven’t taken shelter are limping around in a daze, trying to find their families or making their way toward the medical kiosks. Some of the civvies, probably nurses or doctors when they’re at home, have pitched in and set up a triage system. Barnes considers stopping to help—he can do some basic first aid, because HYDRA didn’t want to lose their Asset to a little thing like a Class III hemorrhage—but he suspects he only knows enough to be dangerous, and his enhanced healing might mess with his sense of how serious wounds are on ordinary people.

 _Do the things you can do,_  says the voice in his head—his father’s, maybe, or his grandfather’s, even; he can’t quite remember who said it, but the words stuck.  _Help when you can, and don't beat yourself up because you can’t fix everything._ And it's good advice, true advice.

But it sucks anyway.

He’s heading back to the hotel, but he detours when he suddenly spots Owen Grady, storming away from a cluster of park security staff with a gun in hand and a fierce expression. Barnes steps out in front of him. “Owen,” he says.

“Oh, hey. It’s Jim, right?” Grady’s eyes dip to his left hand. Barnes has taken off the tac vest and draped it over the gun to be less conspicuous, but it’s not a great disguise. When Grady looks up again, Barnes recognizes the look in his eyes in great detail: he’s had a long day, it’s nowhere near over, and he’s done with bullshit. “Okay,” Grady says, “you’re obviously not from InGen. Who are you really?”

Barnes sighs. He knows how to make Grady cooperate, but Coulson will probably be pissed about him blowing their cover. “You ever heard of SHIELD?”

“Holy shit,” says Grady, which Barnes takes as an affirmative. “I thought SHIELD got disbanded after the clusterfuck in D.C. last year.”

A lot of things survived D.C. that weren’t supposed to. “What do you know about the Indominus Rex?”

At the name, Grady’s face shows anger, frustration, and a little bit of what is, in Barnes’ opinion, extremely well-justified fear. “You know about that? Well, then, I’m guessing you already know they made a monster in the park lab and it got out. They call it a dinosaur, but it’s more than that. It can do some kind of freaky camouflage thing, hide from heat sensors. It’s not an ordinary predator, either. It kills for fun.” All of which Barnes knew already, but then Grady gives him something new: “I heard they made two of those things at first. The one that’s running around out there? It ate the other one.”

“Это безумие.”

“Yeah, I don’t know what that means, but I think you get the picture. And Hoskins—you met Hoskins yet? He’s an asshole—he wants to use my raptors to hunt it down and subdue it.”

“You gonna let him?”

“I don’t have a choice, man. It’s happening with or without me. If I go along, maybe I can keep my raptors under control, which means maybe he doesn’t shoot them once he’s done with them.”

Barnes wishes May was here, so he could gloat about being so right about Grady. “Do you think the raptors can take it?”

“Probably not, but I think they can lead us to it so we can shoot it.”

“Yeah, about that…” Barnes glances at Grady’s gun. It’s a Marlin: a perfectly serviceable rifle, but still a rifle. “You’re gonna want something bigger. Like a rocket launcher. Or a Jericho missile.”

Grady shakes his head, and once again, Barnes recognizes the look: _This situation is CATFU._ He completely agrees. “I don’t suppose you SHIELD folks are interested in helping us out with that?”

“Sorry, I’d like to take out that scaly murderer as much as you, but I’m on a different mission. Anyway, why wouldn’t this Hoskins guy just—”

Barnes stops, and Grady gives him that look again. “You okay?”

“Yeah. Sorry. Gotta go. Look, if you go after that thing, be _careful.”_

“Yeah,” Grady agrees. “I kind of had that figured that out.”

Barnes turns and starts walking, but not in the direction of the hotel. Once he’s out of Grady’s earshot, he flips the switch on the earbud back to _transmit_ and says, “Skye, you around?”

“Yeah,” she answers, “I’m trying to get to you, but this place is a mess. Can you get back to the hotel?”

“Change of plans. I have to go after Wu now.”

There’s a pause, and then she says, “You know there are a million reasons that’s a terrible idea, right?”

“It has to be now, because they’re starting to destroy the evidence.” Grady has unintentionally snapped it all into place for him. “Listen, everybody in this park has a cell phone. What are the chances five hundred people haven’t already tweeted about this? I give it two hours before this place is crawling with troops and news media. There’s a HYDRA protocol for situations like this. Wu will pack up his lab, incinerate anything he can’t move, and disappear as fast as he possibly can. That means our timetable to catch him just moved up.”

“Okay, I don’t know what’s creepier, hearing that HYDRA has protocols for situations like when dinosaurs are eating people, or finding out that you’re apparently on Twitter.”

“Just do me a favor and tell May and Coulson I’m headed back to the Hammond Lab.”

“Would it do _any_ good if I asked you to wait for backup this time? If this Wu’s as dangerous as you think, you’ll only get one shot at this.”

Damn, she just made almost the only argument that would actually give him pause. He’s impressed. Annoyed, but impressed. And she’s right; if the Asset could wait _days_ to take out a target, Barnes can wait for May. “Okay,” he says, “okay. I’ll go around the back and cover that exit.”

“We’ll be right there.”

Barnes doesn’t like the sound of that _we._ He wants Skye as far from this as possible. But he does sneak around to the back of the lab building. The sun’s going down, and it’s not hard to find a place to lurk in the shadows, not far from where May hid earlier in the day. He has a view of the rear exit, where there’s a loading dock and a pickup truck. He pulls the vest back on and settles in to wait.

It isn’t long before the rear doors open and a couple of lab techs come out, carrying a footlocker-sized metal box, which they load into the truck bed. Barnes feels his stomach twist: the box is marked CRYOGENIC TRANSPORT. _Get it together, Barnes,_ he tells himself. _They’re just dinosaur embryos. That box is way too small for a human._ But it’s the first time he’s seen anything that close to a cryo tank since the last time they took him out of one. He can feel his breath coming faster; the palm of his right hand starts to sweat and the fingers of his left hand tighten on the gun.

“Bucky, your heart monitor’s going crazy,” Skye says in his ear. That’s right—the bracelet thing will be feeding this back to Coulson and the team. He has to slow his breathing, bring his reactions back to baseline. He has to wait, and let the SHIELD team help him with this.

But then he sees Wu, and all his good intentions go out the window.

Last time Barnes—or rather, the Asset—saw Henry Wu, it would’ve been 1994 or 1995, when Wu was still a hotshot kid fresh off his first round of playing God. The stories that got out about the dinosaurs in the original Jurassic Park had stunned the whole world, and the science team he’d been given when he was brought into HYDRA had practically groveled at his feet. In the twenty years since, it looks like Wu has gotten used to wielding his authority. He directs the staffers carrying the cryo boxes with short, clipped phrases, pointing here and there and then turning away without waiting for responses, certain his orders will be carried out.

It looks like arrogance, but Barnes thinks: it was never pride that was Wu’s problem, not really. Wu had a high opinion of himself, sure, but he had the brain to back it up. And it’s also not what people said about the original Park—that the scientists got so caught up in whether they could do things that they never stopped to ask themselves whether they should. That implies that they might have been interested in the answer. Wu wasn’t satisfying his intellectual curiosity about whether he could create dinosaurs; he knew he could. But if someone had asked him whether it was ethical—because it’s something he certainly never asked himself—Barnes seriously doubts that Wu would have understood the question.

It’s people like that who founded HYDRA in the first place. It’s people like that who built the Chair.

Barnes grows progressively twitchier as the truck bed fills up and there’s no further chatter over the earbud. Where the hell is his backup? “Skye,” he whispers, “May, Coulson, Fitz, I got eyes on the target, will somebody please tell me what the hell is going on?” Is the SHIELD team in trouble? Should he abandon his task and go looking for them? Or should he grab Wu now and… well, he still hasn’t decided what he’s going to do about Wu yet, but killing him is definitely the most appealing option.

Then Wu gets into the passenger seat and the driver starts to pull away from the building, and Barnes doesn’t even realize what he’s about to do until he’s already out of the shadows and running toward the truck.

“Hey, what the fuck,” somebody yells, but Barnes is already up, boots hitting the front bumper of the truck, then the hood. He’s done this at least a dozen times in his career and his timing is perfect. The metal arm punches through the windshield up to the shoulder, safety glass shatters, and his fingers close, then pull. The steering wheel wrenches off in his hand and he tosses it aside, then jumps clear as the truck veers to the left and tips on its side in the soft earth.

Wu’s staffers come running, but Barnes brings up the gun with his right hand and puts a line of bullets in the ground. These guys may be HYDRA, but they’re scientists, not fighters, and they’re not stupid enough to engage. There are screams, people scatter and run for cover, and Barnes is back at the truck, not quite tearing the passenger door off its hinges, but close. The driver’s breathing but unconscious; Wu looks shaken but unhurt. He reaches in and hauls him out of the truck by the front of his lab coat, and he has a very brief moment of satisfaction when Wu’s eyes widen with recognition. “You’re the Asset!”

Barnes slams Wu’s back against the exposed undercarriage of the truck. _“That’s not my name,”_ he hisses. “But I know yours, Henry Wu. I know what you did.” He drags Wu to his feet. The scientist struggles, but Barnes backhands him, then sets the barrel of the M4 against his back. “Walk,” he says, pointing Wu toward the jungle.

He makes Wu lead the way for a couple hundred yards before he’s satisfied that they haven’t been followed by anybody from the lab. At one point, Wu says to him, “Why did they send you after me? My experiments have been an incredible success. It’s not my fault the park staff here were so inept that—” and Barnes says, “Shut _up,”_ and prods him hard with the gun barrel, and Wu keeps walking. After a while Barnes lets him stop, and says, “Turn around and face me.”

Wu turns around, and now Barnes knows what he’s going to do.

“The little girls, Wu,” Barnes says. “The rejects from the Red Room, the ones they brought to you in that lab in Siberia. The ones whose DNA you were trying to rewrite. Tell me this: did any of them survive?”

“No,” Wu spits. “But we didn’t expect them to. It was always a long shot that we’d get another result like you, _Asset._ But scientific progress requires experimentation. We learned a lot of things from those girls. Especially the ones we treated with the blood and bone marrow _you_ gave for that purpose. That makes you complicit.”

“I don’t claim to be perfectly innocent, Wu, but I was never _complicit_ in those experiments. I was made into the thing that stood by and let you experiment on those children. You know what the difference between you and me is? You turned into a monster without anybody ever putting you in a Chair.”

“Jesus,” Wu says, eyes widening. “HYDRA didn’t send you after me as a scare tactic. You broke your conditioning and went rogue. How is that even possible?”

“You don’t get to ask the questions here, Wu. I do. And I want you to think about this one real carefully.” Barnes takes a deep breath, and says, “Give me one good reason why I shouldn’t kill you where you stand.”

There are several reasons he’ll accept, he’s decided. Any hint at all that he’s sorry, not that Barnes is expecting that one. Also, any suggestion that he might defect. Barnes still wouldn’t exactly trust him to use his skills to save the world if he went to work for SHIELD, but Coulson’s people might be able to keep him in check, make him do more good than harm. If he doesn’t get an answer that satisfies him…

Some things are just too dangerous to go free in the world. That’s all there is to it.

Wu opens his mouth, and Barnes tenses, waiting to find out which way this is going to go… which way _he’s_ going to go. But what Wu says is, “Кудрявка.”

Then everything goes dark, and Barnes falls.


	15. Out of the Frying Pan

Barnes comes to on a concrete floor, in a tiled room with one door and no windows. He has a splitting headache and he can’t move his arms, and for a terrible moment he thinks he’s just been wiped and he’s still in the Chair. Then it comes back to him, and before he’s even fully awake, he starts struggling. His arms are bound behind his back with thick, sturdy nylon straps, the kind used to secure heavy cargo, and his efforts make them dig painfully into his chest. They’ve been smart about this; the straps are positioned to leave him no leverage to work with, and he knows right away that even his metal arm is never going to break them.

This is bad, this is _very_ bad, but there are two things he’s holding onto that are preventing him from going into a full-blown panic. First, if there was a Chair here, he—or more likely, the Asset—would have woken up in it. That means he’s got a little bit of time to work with. Second, he can still feel the SHIELD tracker on his right wrist.

“Asset,” a voice says. Barnes turns his head and spots the source: a speaker mounted in the corner, just above what looks like an old, boxy video camera. “Status report.”

It isn’t Wu’s voice. It’s a young voice, more nervous than authoritative. Maybe there’s a way he can use that.

“Asset,” the voice says again, when he ignores its order and keeps struggling, “status report.”

“Это не мое имя,” he spits, still fighting the restraints.

“Jeez, I thought this guy spoke English,” the voice says faintly, as if the owner has turned away from the mic.

“Try making it an order,” says a second voice, “Wu said that’s how you have to deal with this guy,” and Barnes suddenly sees his advantage.

Wu knew the Winter Soldier had an override command—which Barnes didn’t, because obviously, you don’t tell a gun it has a safety. But Wu must not have known it was just a shutdown. He must have thought it was a _reset._

Barnes can use this.

“Asset,” the voice says, “HYDRA command orders you to give a status report in English.”

Barnes stops struggling and sits up, which is harder in practice than in theory, with his arms tied. He fixes his face into a neutral expression before he turns toward the camera. “Codename: Winter Soldier reporting to HYDRA command,” he says, his voice as flat and neutral as he can make it. The habit of obedience comes back to him like a muscle memory, and he tries not to think about the fact that it feels almost comfortably familiar. “Awaiting mission assignment. Functionality at approximately eighty percent. Functionality compromised by ten-inch laceration on left shin and possible dislocation of right shoulder. Request medical assistance to restore full functionality.”

He guesses they weren’t expecting him to ask for anything, because there’s a frantic muffled conference on the other end of the line, during which the words “Are we allowed to—” come through clearly. “Asset,” the voice says, when it comes back, “continue to wait for mission briefing and, uh, stand by for medical treatment.”

Barnes waits, unmoving. After what feels like forever, the door to the room opens, and now Barnes really has to fight not to smile. The young lab tech probably doesn’t weigh a buck-fifty soaking wet. And the door has an old-fashioned manual deadbolt that doesn’t automatically lock behind him.

“Okay, Asset,” he says, “stay still while I check out that shoulder,” and he _actually unties Barnes’ hands,_ like a complete idiot.

Two seconds after the straps fall away, Barnes has thrown the guy backward, cracking his head against the tile wall. He doesn’t check the guy for weapons, or even check if he’s breathing; his first and only priority is escape. In another five seconds he’s out of the room, throwing the deadbolt on the door before he takes off down a hall that’s lit up with red EXIT signs. After an unforgivable eleven-second delay, alarms start to blare; after fifteen seconds, he’s slammed through a door that leads outside and is running for all he’s worth across a concrete lot illuminated by sodium lights. He hears shouts and pounding feet behind him, but it isn’t fast enough to stop him from making it past the treeline, and from there, he can melt into shadows with the best of them. When he’s far enough from the building that he judges he’ll be impossible to track in the woods, in the dark, he sits down with his back against a tree trunk and lets himself laugh silently for a minute.

Honestly, he can hardly believe those poor saps fell for a trick that was ancient when he was a kid. But Wu probably told them to expect compliance, and they were so afraid they’d damaged a valuable piece of equipment that they didn’t think it through before they tried to fix it. That’s always been HYDRA’s problem—terrorize your underlings too much, and they learn to panic at the thought of displeasing you. Those poor chumps are going to be _so screwed_ when Wu finds out, he almost feels sorry for them. But then, presumably they knew what they were getting into when they decided to join an evil Nazi organization that makes man-eating dinosaurs, so, not real sorry.

Okay, first question: where the fuck is he? The building he just broke out of feels like industrial construction from the late 1980s or so, about the right era for the original Jurassic Park, but he doesn’t recognize it from the Isla Nublar blueprints. The jungle looks like jungle. Depending on how long he was out, he could be anywhere in Central America by now.

He wants another look at the building, so he makes a wide circle through the trees, coming back around the other side. There’s a sign at what looks like it used to be a front entrance, next to a half-overgrown driveway:

 **INTERNATIONAL GENETICS INC.**  
**SITE B: TESTING FACILITY #2**

Well, now he knows he’s at Site B, whatever that is. He’s pretty sure he’s no longer on Isla Nublar. He hopes he isn’t out of range of whatever can read his SHIELD tracking device, but if he is, there’s not a damn thing he can do about it.

Which brings him to the second question: where the fuck is the SHIELD team? He has no way to reach out to them; Wu’s people took both his earbud and his cell phone. (They also took his vest, his gun, and all of his knives, which is sad. As long as his metal arm is functional, it’s not as if he’s unar—as if he’s been dis—as if he’s _weaponless,_ but he really liked those knives.) If Skye and May are all right, why haven’t they come after him? If they’re not… He doesn’t want to think about that possibility. No, he has to assume he’s on his own for the time being.

And that leads right into the last question: Now what? Going after Wu is out. He doesn’t know if the shutdown code will work twice, but it’s not a risk he’s interested in taking. If they catch him again, they won’t be as stupid a second time. They’ll sedate him until he’s been through a couple rounds in the Chair. Nope, he wants to put as much distance between Wu and himself as possible.

There’s a road leading away from Testing Facility #2, and he retreats back into the jungle, thinking that he’ll move parallel to it for a while, see where it goes. Maybe he’ll find another building and figure out a way to get inside and contact SHIELD, or maybe he’ll hit a coastline he can follow and find a boat he can steal. It’s a shitty plan—hell, it’s not even a plan, it’s more like 12% of a plan—but it’s marginally better than striking off blind into God knows how many miles of jungle in any given direction.

He’s hardly started walking, though, when floodlights all around the lab flare to life behind him.

“Asset. Зимний Солдат.” It’s Wu’s voice, singsonging the words through a loudspeaker somewhere back around the lab. A chill goes through Barnes. He knows the bastard can’t possibly have any idea where he is, but it’s eerie, and if Wu says the shutdown word again…

But he doesn’t. Maybe it was a one-use code, or maybe Wu has just decided it’s more entertaining this way. “Asset, are you listening?” Wu says, and then, “Oh, but that’s not your name anymore, is it? Is it, James? Would you like to know what else was in your file, James? I read all of it, you know, when they brought you to me in Siberia. Quite an interesting history. It’s a shame we could never replicate Zola’s results, much less Erskine’s. I think we’ll get there eventually, though. We have plenty of your blood to work with, and the science gets a little better every year. One day we’ll find out what was special about you and Rogers, and then there’s no telling what we’ll be able to do. Personally, I wonder if our mistake was trying to replicate the results on those girls from the Red Room. Maybe we should have picked up some young boys from Brooklyn to work with.”

Barnes’ fists clench at the mention of Rogers, and again at the mention of the girls, but he knows Wu is trying to rile him up, to make him break cover. He’s not going to fall for it.

“Here’s what I’m going to do, James. I’m going to give you… oh, let’s say an hour to turn yourself in. And after that? I’m going to release some of the _new_ assets. Did you get a chance to meet our velociraptors while you were in Jurassic World? The T. Rex? Maybe even the I. Rex?”

 _Oh,_ Barnes thinks, _right, of course he had spares._ HYDRA wouldn’t build such a fantastic murder machine only to turn it over to be an exhibit in an amusement park. He wonders if Wu always had a third I. Rex stashed at InGen Site B Lab Facility #2, or if the story about the first one killing its sister was just a cover to sneak one of them out of the park.

“Well, you’re going to meet one now, James,” Wu says. “Because if you don’t turn yourself in within the next hour, I’m going to start releasing the carnivores to hunt you. And they will hunt you, James. The heads of HYDRA would prefer to take you alive, but it won’t be a crushing blow to them if you don’t make it out of this. You’ve caused them a lot of trouble in the last year, and I think they’ll be almost as glad to see you dead. So what will it be? Turn yourself in and keep your life, or…?”

If he says anything else after that, Barnes doesn’t hear it. He’s already racing through the jungle as fast as he can in the dark, which is faster than the average person, but still not nearly fast enough to give him any kind of a real edge, not once the raptors and Rexes come out of containment.

He’s got an hour’s head start, if Wu isn’t the lying son of a bitch Barnes believes he is. An hour’s head start in the world’s most horrifying game of cat-and-mouse.

He’s got no guns.

No knives.

No comms.

No backup.

One metal arm, his only gear and his only weapon.

An unknown number of dinosaurs about to be on his six.

Oh, and has he mentioned that he’s pretty sure his leg _and_ some of the raw patches on his back have started seeping blood again, just to make this whole thing more fun for the carnivores that track by scent?

 _I am so fucked,_ Barnes thinks, and then, _Steve, I should’ve sent you that stupid postcard. I should’ve told you I remember. I should’ve told you I…_ And then he can’t think anything but, _Shit. Shit. Shit. Fuck. Shit._

He’s pretty sure it’s only been about twenty minutes when he hears the first predator’s roar.


	16. Operations Center

Barnes is moving as fast as he can across the uneven jungle floor, certain that at any second, he’s going to run straight into a hungry carnivore or step down in a hole and snap his ankle, leaving him easy prey for anything that happens by. Thank God the moon’s only a couple days from full, or even with his enhanced vision, he’d be crashing into trees. He’s heard the T. Rex roar a couple of times now, and each time he’s changed course, not so much that he’s going in circles—he hopes not, anyway; even in his Howling Commandos days, he was shit at navigating in the woods at night—but enough that he’s been heading steadily away from _it_ as well as from Wu’s lab. When he hits what looks like a game trail, he follows it. The good thing about dinosaurs is that they aren’t subtle; the grass and foliage are crushed for a meter across. And then he spots something else: a gleam of moonlight on standing water in a strangely regular impression in the mud. He crouches to inspect it. It’s almost completely hidden by the torn-up earth and crushed grass left by whatever dinosaur usually uses this trail, but yeah, it’s definitely there.

Tire tracks.

So someone besides a pack of herbivores uses this trail to get from place to place. And that means there’s something at the end of this trail worth getting to.

Once he picks up the trail, the going gets easier, and after a while he comes out from under the treeline to find a long, deep valley stretching out in front of him. There’s a large lake at the bottom of the valley, and at the far end of the lake—well, he was hoping to find some kind of human habitation, and there it is: a gray concrete structure maybe three stories tall, partly supported by pylons sunk into the water, with some kind of weird metal fixture on the roof.

It’s a long shot, but if that metal thing is an antenna, maybe that building has something he can use to contact SHIELD. Maybe.

The quickest route to the building is across a long, gently sloping field of waist-high grass. Appropriately enough for the day he’s having, it turns out to be full of little biting gnats, but that’s not what makes him freeze, then dart back under cover of the trees.

Way out in the field, somewhere off his ten o’clock, the grass is rustling.

Barnes is lucky he even heard it. A non-enhanced human wouldn’t have. He crouches in deep shadow at the base of a tree, one with low branches he can go right up if he needs to—not that it’ll do a lot of good if something big has his scent. But he waits, and soon, a head pops out of the grass.

This time Barnes isn’t letting his guard down, but it’s not as bad as he expected. It’s not a raptor; it’s just a weird lizardy thing with a long neck and a small head. He still wouldn’t want it to bite him, but its teeth are small and flat, not the curved fangs of a carnivore. It looks a lot like one of those little compsowhatsits, except that it’s over two meters long. It doesn’t seem to know Barnes is there. It hisses, then makes a weird fluttery vocalization, and another head pops up in the grass ten yards away, then a third, then more. A whole flock of them.

The predator comes out of nowhere. It’s not there and then it is and the bigger-than-a-compsowhatsit makes a horrible screeching sound and then its neck is broken, and its buddies out in the field all take off in a panicked stampede, and Barnes has a flash of ridiculously distant memory—

_C’mon, Stevie, I wanna go back to the dinosaurs. Who goes to the museum to look at some old dead cat?_

_Do you even know what a saber is, Bucky? Trust me, you’re gonna like this—_

—And the smilodon drags the carcass of the bigger-than-a-compsowhatsit off into the grass to feed.

Aw, come _on,_ it’s not even just dinosaurs anymore, it’s _all_ the extinct things? Couldn’t even be a reasonably benign thing like a wooly mammoth, so he’d only have to worry about getting trampled? Oh, no, InGen and HYDRA both have to keep building things with fangs. Serve them right if they all got eaten.

He’d feel so much better if he had just one gun—any gun, he isn’t picky. Or any of his knives, for that matter. Even a sharpened stick would be better than nothing.

Barnes can hear the wet ripping sounds of the cat’s oversized teeth tearing at chunks of meat, not nearly far enough away. He knows he has to keep moving, or worse things than the cat will find him, but he definitely doesn’t want to get too close and let it think he’s threatening its meal. He circles back through the woods and hugs the treeline until he stumbles onto, and almost into, a creek that cuts a wide, shallow path through the grass. He picks up a baseball-sized rock that he tosses from hand to hand a couple times, getting familiar with the weight of it, while he follows the creek bed down to the lake; then he slogs through the mud at the water’s edge.

The sky is finally getting lighter up ahead. Okay, so he’s headed east, which is more than he knew a few minutes ago. Pros of sunrise: his sense of direction’s back, and the nocturnal predators will crawl back in their holes. Cons of sunrise: the daytime predators will start waking up, and also, this means it’s been nine or ten hours since he’s heard from the SHIELD team, which is pushing the limits of his hopefulness that they could swoop in and rescue him any second and that pretty soon they’ll all be laughing about this over breakfast.

Man, he wishes he hadn’t thought about food. The faster-than-normal metabolism is a blessing and a curse, because now he’s so hungry that going back and fighting a saber-toothed tiger for a chunk of raw dinosaur meat is starting to sound good.

_C’mon, Barnes. Focus._

The building is ugly up close, three stories of poured concrete and busted-out plate glass windows. It reminds him a little of the rat-trap motel where he ended up crashing for too long right after D.C., while he waited for the flood of new memories to settle down in his skull. He heads up a staircase with a bent aluminum railing, pauses, looks critically at the banister, and then reaches out with his metal hand and breaks off a section about eighteen inches long, with a sharp edge at the end.

 _Hey, look at that, now you’ve got a rock_ and _a stick. Barnes, you’re unstoppable._

The door is open, and inside he finds a cavernous room full of typical abandoned-building mess: a couple old desks with laughably outdated computers and phones (he tries one on the off chance, but it’s unsurprisingly dead) and scattered papers and trash, plus debris from whatever critters have been making homes in here since the building was abandoned. He brushes a cobweb aside and moves forward. A reptile stink hangs in the air, but nothing jumps out at him. On the far wall is what looks like it might be a fusebox. He opens it and finds one of those big switches that look like a monster’s going to come to life if you throw it. He doesn’t expect anything to happen when he pushes the handle up, but apparently they forgot to cut power to this place when they abandoned it, because something hums to life somewhere, and a bank of fluorescent bulbs goes on overhead.

Now he can see the layer of grime over everything—grime and cockroaches that scuttle away from the light, and God, he thought they got big in Brooklyn, but these are in a whole different class of disgusting. But he can also see a sign that says _Welcome to Site B Operations Center_ over a floor plan. His eyes go straight to a room on the second floor: _Communications Center._ That’s his target.

Upstairs looks like downstairs, only less like it used to be full of desk jockeys and more like it used to be full of engineers, which makes for a different kind of trash involving more broken electronics and wire. The Communications Center is a large room with banks of TV monitors and switchboards that all look as dead as the phones—in some places he sees frayed wires that animals have chewed through—but a black box with a silver faceplate and a lot of switches and knobs catches his eye, and he crosses the room in two quick steps to take a look.

Glory hallelujah, it’s a ham radio. He has jiggle some wires to get it to come to life, but after that, it doesn’t take him long to open transmission. He grabs the handset, silently begs the universe, _Just, please, let SHIELD be monitoring on all frequencies,_ and says, “Barnes to Coulson, Barnes to Coulson, come in, Coulson.”

He waits for five minutes, transmits it again, waits again. Nothing.

“Barnes to SHIELD, Barnes to SHIELD, come in, SHIELD.”

Same thing. Same nothing.

“Mayday, mayday, mayday, any station, SHIELD Agent Barnes transmitting—” Shit, the next piece is _nature of emergency_ and that usually narrows it down a little more than this. “Hostiles in pursuit, InGen Site B operations center. Mayday, mayday, mayd—”

Something rustles behind him and Barnes spins.

A lizard’s head pokes around the doorframe. It’s just a little one, maybe two feet tall, but it’s a little one with the bright yellow eyes of a raptor, and when it opens its mouth, it also shows a raptor’s teeth.

Once it steps into the doorway, it makes a chirping call, and then there’s another head, and a third, and Barnes has a sinking feeling that he knows what’s happening here. It’s confirmed when the one in front crouches and wiggles its little tail as if it’s getting ready to jump, which objectively ought to be cute, but he knows it means things are about to get very bad, very quickly.

He should’ve done more recon before he got distracted by the radio. There must be a raptor’s nest somewhere in this building, and these juveniles look like they’re right at the age where they’re learning how to hunt. This must be like a pizza delivery to them, a human showing up right on their doorstep.

The radio crackles, and between bursts of static, somebody says, “Barnes? Come in, Ba—” and he can either grab the handset or the metal bar and he goes for the bar, because there’s something else moving in the hallway now, a long shadow creeping into the doorway, and the juveniles alone wouldn’t be a problem but this is no good, no good at _all,_ because where there’s a nest, he knows, you’re going to find a mother.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Beautiful readers! You have been so utterly fantastic and supportive of my first real true epic fic adventure. Please know that if you left a comment that I didn't answer, I guarantee I still read it and squeed with joy that you took the time to say you liked something I did (or that I was irredeemably evil, which I may have liked even better). :D
> 
> I am sorry for the unpredictable delays between updates; I've been in a bit of a personal hell at my real job, and I have at least one more week of it to survive before I can give Bucky the attention he deserves. I do have the rest of this story loosely plotted out (4-5 more chapters) and I'll try to make it appropriately violent, bloody, and satisfying. :)
> 
> P.S. Did anyone else wonder how they were so sure in the movies that they were getting _dinosaur_ DNA out of those mosquitoes? I want them to bring back the eohippus, dammit.


	17. Hunger Games

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Please don't try any of this at home, kids.

The next time Barnes gets a brilliant notion that he wants to atone for his sins and maybe exact a little well-deserved revenge on HYDRA in the process, he’s going to be more a hell of a lot more specific about the timeframe. Next time he’ll plan to do it gradually over a couple of years, not in the space of a week or two with hardly enough time between fights to stop bleeding. And he’s definitely never, _ever_ doing another revenge involving dinosaurs.

The juvenile raptors are playing with him like kittens, darting in to mock-bite at him whenever they think he’s distracted. It’d be cute as hell if he didn’t know how that game ends. He swings the metal bar at them like a baseball bat, keeping them out of attack range, but they still manage to back him halfway across the room, while Mama Raptor stands in the doorway, watching with a disturbingly familiar expression of motherly pride. As far as she knows, her babies have the soft squishy mammal completely under control. Barnes knows that he could kill all three juveniles in four seconds. The reason he hasn’t—besides the fact that even if they’re monsters, they’re still _babies,_ and he's not a complete asshole—is that he knows the second he hurts any of them, the mother is going to lose her mind.

Yeah, Barnes remembers the time Steve’s mother was the one who caught the bully whaling on her kid. The year after that was probably the most peaceful of either of their lives, because word got around: if you ever decide to pick on the little guy, you better _hope_ Bucky Barnes finds you before Stevie’s ma does. And Sarah Rogers didn’t even have five-inch claws to work with.

He could run, he thinks, jabbing at the juvenile in front as it comes in for another feint. But then they’ll all chase him, including the mother. No, what he needs to do is separate Mama Raptor from the babies. He has an idea for that, but it’s not going to be comfortable.

He maneuvers carefully, giving ground and letting the babies think they have him on the ropes, until he backs up against the desk where he set down the rock. His metal fingers grope until he finds it. Then he says, “Hey, doll, you wanna dance?” and flings the rock at Mama Raptor’s head.

Mama Raptor jerks out of the way and the rock glances off her skull, just hard enough to really piss her off. Then she lunges, and Barnes takes one quick step sideways and grapples her throat with his metal hand just before she slams him backward through the window. Shattered glass flies everywhere and Barnes and Mama Raptor both take a two-story drop, while she tries to close her jaws around his arm and he tries to twist in the air so he won’t land flat on his back.

Чёрт возьми, that’s another one for the list. Next grand revenge project, no falling. Not out of things, not off of things, and not onto things, especially not if those things are concrete patios.

The impact knocks the breath out of both of them, but it breaks Mama Raptor’s grip, and Barnes rolls away as she jumps back to her feet. She starts to come after him again, but Little Moe, Larry, and Curly are making agitated noises from the second story of the ops center, and when she glances back at the window, Barnes exploits her hesitation to get up and run.

Behind the operations center, most of an abandoned town is still standing. It must’ve been intended for the poor saps who were supposed to run this place, once upon a time. The nearest options are a fueling station, a big dorm-like building, and a store, complete with a sign painted over the door: _InGeneral_. Ugh, whoever thought that up definitely deserves to get eaten. He makes a break for the store, grabs the handle of the door with his left hand, and yanks so hard that it tears the flimsy latch completely out of the wood before he ducks inside. The front window of the store is plate glass, so it might not matter how well he blocks the door, but he drags a couple heavy crates in front of it and then ducks behind the counter.

Mama Raptor’s head pops up over the edge of the window, and she hovers around outside for several minutes, clearly trying to decide if it’s worth breaking the glass to come after him. Apparently is isn’t, because Barnes sees her turn and huff away, back toward the Ops Center and her little monster brood.

Good. Okay. One problem solved. Now, as long as he’s in here, he’s going to regroup and take some precautions before he lets himself consider whether it’s worth trying to go back in for the radio.

First stop: the aisle marked _Health and Wellness._ Not surprisingly, somebody was concerned about first aid at Site B, because this place is well stocked. Barnes splashes all the scrapes and cuts he can reach with alcohol, then covers them with gauze and tape. It’s not infection he’s thinking about; it’s minimizing the smell of blood. He knows the raptors and probably a lot of other things can still track like bloodhounds, but he still wants to give them as few advantages as possible. He’d kill—well, he’d definitely kill a dinosaur or a HYDRA-affiliated human—for some of those gel packs that get cold when you break them, because he’s picked up an exciting new collection of bruises, but his luck proves lousy as usual in that regard.

He walks past an aisle of hair stuff, stops, goes back, and gets a brush and a new hair tie. He feels kind of bad about losing Skye’s. Which is probably weird, but brainwashed HYDRA escapees are entitled to some quirks. Anyway, soon his hair is tied back neatly and there’s no more glass in it, so he’s got that going for him.

Hey, there are some actual knives in a display case under the counter. He punches the glass out of it and takes a look. They’re small—the longest is four inches, the shortest is a Swiss army knife—but again, they’re better than nothing. He sticks the long one in his belt and feels better about life.

He’s standing in front of an ancient display of snack food, debating whether it’s worth testing that old story about Twinkies lasting forever (cons: potential projectile vomiting followed by death; pros: he’s _really really hungry)_ when a shrill sound cuts through the store. Barnes jumps back, knocking over a rack of mildewed paperback novels, before he realizes what it is.

There’s a hardwired phone on the wall behind the counter, and the damn thing is ringing.

The phone rings three more times before he can bring himself to cross the store and answer it. It has to be Skye, it _has_ to, she must have found a way to get into the Site B switchboard, which means they know where he is and they can get him out of this godforsaken place. His voice is hoarse when he answers: “Skye, is it you? Thank God, I thought you were all dead, Skye—”

“Skye?” says the voice on the other end, and Barnes goes cold. “No, James. This is Henry Wu.”

 

It’s a good thing Barnes grabbed the phone with his right hand, because otherwise, the metal hand would have crushed the plastic receiver. Wu knows where he is, and knows a code that might or might not shut down his brain again, and there’s absolutely nothing he can do about it.

“Only my mother gets to call me James,” he says, because it’s practically the Barnes family motto that no matter how bad something is, you can always run your mouth at it. “You can call the last thing you’ll ever see on God’s green earth. You hear me, asshole?”

His voice rises until he’s shouting into the phone, but Wu… Wu is laughing.The guy’s not only HYDRA, he’s insane. “Sorry, your SHIELD friends aren't on their way to save you, but I’ll make you a very generous offer. You have one more chance to turn yourself in, and we’ll help you forget that it’s your fault Skye is dead.”

No. _No._ Not the team. Not Skye. Not Skye.

It’s happening again, the dizzy sick feeling, chest heaving, muscles shaking. With an effort, he stills himself. He knows Wu is a lying liar who lies, and this is a classic HYDRA tactic—they used to tell him Steve was dead, too, when they were trying to break him, back before they perfected the Chair—but the words tear out of him anyway: “My fault?”

“You blew their cover, ‘SHIELD Agent Barnes.’ We got a good look at your earpiece and traced it back to its source. Skye, unfortunately, didn’t survive the raid. Melinda May, though… what a prize, the famous Cavalry. I’m eager to see how she responds to a few rounds in the prefrontal cortex recalibration device. Sorry, James—you’d know that as the Chair.”

“Я собираюсь уничтожить тебя,” Barnes says, very softly. “Я сожгу тебя на землю.”

“Shall I take that as a no? All right, James. I’m sending something to the store for you. I advise you not to run. It’ll be easier for both of you that w—”

Barnes slams the phone into its cradle before Wu can finish. Then, as an afterthought, he reaches out his metal hand and tears it out of the wall. He crosses the store and grabs every remaining knife from the case. He spots a cigarette lighter, takes that too, goes back to the aisle with the brushes and hair stuff and grabs two cans of aerosol hairspray.

Let Wu think he’s bluffing. He’s not. Barnes has killed more people with less materiel than this, and that wasn’t even personal.

He’s heading out the door, quickly, when something catches his eye. On one of his trips back and forth, he kicked over the bottle of rubbing alcohol, and it’s puddled on the store’s gritty linoleum. But just for a second, Barnes thought he saw movement.

There it is again. Ripples on the surface of the liquid, like something is shaking the ground.

_Like something is shaking the ground._

It’s only another couple of seconds before he hears it: a heavy, rhythmic tread, picking up speed as it comes closer to the town. Barnes peers out the front window in the direction of the woods, just in time to see a horned head emerge from the trees, pale gray-green.

It’s Wu’s second Indominus Rex—the sibling, or clone, or whatever it is. The twin of the one Barnes barely got away from with his life when he had more than pocket knives to bring to a dinosaur fight.

The I. Rex stomps down the town’s main street, snuffling and grunting. Did HYDRA train this thing? Is it actually looking for him, or is it just looking for anything alive, anything that’s prey? Barnes can’t tell, but he suspects the result is going to be the same. He moves as quietly as he can to the back of the store, where there’s an emergency exit. He throws the bolt, nudges the door open just a crack, and closes his eyes for a moment in frustrated disbelief when it lets out a deafening squeal.

Sure enough, the footsteps stop, just outside the store. The I. Rex has found him.

The moment of dead silence that follows might put an ordinary person off their guard. Not Barnes. When the I. Rex’s head crashes through the plate glass window, he’s ready. He hurls one of the aerosol cans at the thing, smacking it squarely into the dinosaur’s open mouth. Then he runs toward it with a second can in his left hand and the lighter in his right. His timing had better be _perfect_ on this.

It is. He hits the I. Rex’s mouth with a blast of fire from his makeshift flamethrower, drops to his knees, and slides past it just as surprise makes it bite down on the first canister, and the chemicals go up in flames.

The I. Rex roars and flings its head back, ripping away the window frame, half the shoddy wall, and part of the roof, and Barnes goes out the back door like a bullet out of a gun. The only thing he can think to do is run back toward the ops center, because the I. Rex is thrashing around between him and every other building in the town, and that thing has put fighting an angry raptor mother into a completely new perspective.

When he feels the ground start to shake behind him again, Barnes risks a glance over his shoulder to see that he did manage to do some damage. Half the dinosaur’s lower jaw is blown apart; blackened scaly skin hangs in loose flaps around the mouth, revealing way too many teeth. But that’s not enough to kill it, only enough to royally piss it off. It’s still got more than enough of a working mouth to bite him in half if he lets it. And he knows the look it’s got—the animal rage, a predator’s complete disbelief that the prey _hurt it back_. There’s nothing that’s going to stop this dinosaur from coming after him for all it’s worth, no possible way he’s going to tire it out or make it lose interest. But the one possible good thing about rage like this is that maybe, just _maybe,_ the I. Rex is angry enough to make a mistake.

To find out, he’s going to have to try something stupid. When he reaches the ops center, he keeps running past the ugly concrete building, down to the lake shore. The I. Rex is gaining and his boots are sinking into the mud, but he keeps slogging forward until the water is waist deep. Then he dives.

Barnes doesn’t like being underwater. The metal arm is _supposed_ to function in all conditions, but he knows the difference between water-resistant and waterproof. But he has pretty good lung capacity and a strong dolphin kick. He can’t see for shit under the murky water, so he swims until his chest is bursting, then pops back up to the surface and looks back toward the lake shore—and glory hallelujah, it actually worked. The I. Rex is up to its haunches in the water and raging, thrashing and churning up thick, dark mud with its hind limbs. Is it… is it _stuck?_ It is. It’s stuck.

Oh, God, this is great. Scary-ass prehistoric monster throwing a temper tantrum because of mud. He wishes he had a camera. He'd totally break his cover to send Steve a video of this.

Then something massive and dark rises up through the water underneath him, and he’s back to his regularly scheduled program of _oh shit oh shit oh shit_.

A snakelike head and a long neck pop up out of the water less than ten meters from him. It’s… it’s not as big as the I. Rex, but somehow, it’s even more wrong. Then he realizes: people nowadays, even him, are used to dinosaurs. If you don’t go to Jurassic World and see them yourself, you still see the advertising, the magazine articles, the specials on TV. The thing in the water, well, it _is_ a dinosaur, but it doesn’t look like one. It looks like the Loch Ness monster, or something out of _20,000 Leagues Under the Sea:_ something that’s not just extinct, but actually mythical.

Barnes spends a moment torn between horror and awe, and then the lake monster opens its mouth to shriek at the I. Rex, showing about eight thousand needlelike teeth, and he settles on _time to get the fuck out of here_ and starts swimming for the opposite shoreline. Chances are there’s only one of those things and it only eats fish, but he doesn’t need to find out the hard way.

Once he’s out of the water, a quick glance back shows him that he hasn’t solved the I. Rex problem yet. It’s mad as hell at the water dinosaur and they’re hissing and posturing at each other, but the I. Rex is also starting to break free of the mud and find its footing. It’ll have to go around the lake to start chasing him again, but he doesn’t think it will give up.

Barnes is running out of ideas. He’s exhausted and, to be perfectly honest, he’s terrified of what Wu can do to him and might already have done to the first real friends he’s had in a long time. He’s reaching the limits of how far he can push himself on anger alone, and goddammit, he just needs something to go _right…_

And then, to his complete surprise, something does.

When Barnes hears the explosion, his old foxhole instincts take over and he throws himself flat before it consciously registers in his brain, but it's clear that the weapon wasn’t aimed at him. He takes cover behind a stand of trees before he turns back and looks at the lake shore. A cloud of smoke is starting to clear, and in the center of it, the I. Rex is down. Not dead—not quite—but it’s writhing in the mud with a hole blown through the side of it, thrashing but unable to rise. It’s roaring, still furious, even in what have to be its death throes, but the man who’s walking toward it is calm. He swings the rocket launcher down from his shoulder, stands a few yards back from the I. Rex’s head, brings up a second gun and fires two shots through the dinosaur’s open mouth, into the brain stem. The Indominus Rex gives one last spasm and goes limp.

“That’s for what your sister did to Charlie and Echo, you scaly bitch,” says Owen Grady.


	18. Choppers

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “You lead an interesting life, don’t you, Bucky Barnes?”  
> “I’ll say this for it, I’m usually not bored.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'd love to tell you all that this chapter was delayed by the fact that my neighbors managed to set the cable internet box on FIRE, but it probably would've taken about the same amount of time to finish anyway.

“Jim? Hey, Jim, where are you?” Grady shouts, and Barnes breaks cover and waves across the lake. He starts heading toward Grady, but Grady says, “Hang on, I’m coming to you,” and disappears around the corner of the ops center. A moment later, Barnes hears a beautiful sound: the rev of a motorcycle engine. He has a sudden, visceral memory of olive green paint and the smell of gas, and grease on his hands, back when they were still a matched set; Steve saying _you don’t have to do that, Bucky, we have mechanics on base,_ as if anybody was getting their hands on that Harley besides him, and his reply: _Leave me alone, punk, I’m tryin’ to fix Captain America’s bike over here._

Heroic idiots on motorcycles. Huh. Barnes has a type.

Grady stops the bike a few feet from him. “Your friends at SHIELD sent me—” he begins, then stops abruptly, looking Barnes over. “What the hell happened to you?”

Barnes gives a mirthless laugh. “In order? Fought some dinosaurs, got the crap beat out of me by a secret agent, fought some more dinosaurs, got chased around by a really _big_ dinosaur, fell down a hill, fought a flying dinosaur that knocked me off a roof, got caught by HYDRA, escaped, hiked out, jumped out a window, tried to blow up a dinosaur, jumped in the lake, and that’s where you came in. Thanks for the save, by the way. I owe you.”

“Not a problem,” Grady says, looking slightly dazed. “Mind if I ask what’s up with your arm?” He gestures at Barnes’ left side. “Is that body armor or something?”

Shit. Barnes had forgotten that Mama Raptor ripped up the glove and most of the sleeve that should’ve concealed his metal arm. “This? Nah, it’s a high-end prosthetic. Lost my real arm in the war.”

“Shit, man, I’m sorry. IED?”

“Fell off a train. …And a mountain.”

Grady looks like he has about a hundred more questions, but Barnes cuts him off before they can go down that rabbit hole. “The SHIELD team,” he says, “are they okay? Is Skye okay?”

“Ask them yourself. They gave me this for you.”

Grady hands him another little plastic earpiece, just like the one Wu took from him. He settles it into his ear, switches it on, and says tentatively, “Barnes to SHIELD, do you copy?”

“Bucky!” It’s Skye’s voice, and Barnes slumps with relief. On the other end, it sounds like Skye is doing the same. “Oh my God, Bucky, your tracker cut out and they said you were dead and I thought—”

“Skye, slow down. Who said I was dead?”

“HYDRA. They came after me and May, and another team hit the SHIELD base at the same time. We took a few of them alive and they all said Wu was going to kill you.”

“Killing me was probably Plan B,” Barnes says, through clenched teeth. Fucking HYDRA and their fucking head games. Bad enough when it’s just him, but the fact that they messed with the first real friends he’s made in seventy years makes him feel white-hot with rage. “Is anybody hurt?”

“May got sort of banged up in the fight, but not too bad. The rest of us are okay. Are you?”

“Yeah. Where are you? Shit, where am I? And where’s Wu? Tell me you have him in custody.”

“You’re on Isla Sorna. It’s an InGen backup site. Grady was on his way to find you when your tracker cut out, and we didn’t know where you were until we got the radio signal. We’re still in Costa Rica, but we’re coming to you as soon as May clears medical—we’ll be there in the next couple hours. Just stick with Grady until then and please, please, please don’t do anything stupid, okay?”

It’s clear that she intentionally ignored the most important question. “Where’s Henry Wu?”

“We’ll bring him in later. If you sit tight until we get there, I swear we’ll—”

“I just want to know where he is, Skye. That’s it, I promise.”

She hesitates, then says quickly, as if she’s afraid to lose her nerve, “There’s a big InGen facility five miles south of the lake. A power plant and some labs and containment areas. We think he’s there, but _don’t_ go after him, Bucky. Wait till we send a team, okay?”

“I promise I’ll be safe, Skye. You take care of May and get here when you can. Over and out.”

Barnes flips the switch on the earbud to stop transmitting, and motions for Grady to do the same. Grady does, looking puzzled. “Okay, Jim,” he says, “level with me here. Your cover ID was Jim Buchanan. Coulson said your real name is James Barnes. Who the hell is Bucky?”

Barnes gives him a tight-lipped smile. “Bucky’s the guy who’s about to do something really stupid,” he admits. “You in?”

“Am I _in?_ I’ve been working for literal Nazis for years now without even knowing it, and in the last twenty-four hours it’s gotten two of my raptors and God knows how many people killed, almost got me and my friends eaten so many times I’ve lost count, and now you’re telling me you’re gonna go against your CO’s orders to try to take down the son of a bitch who’s responsible?”

“Pretty much.”

“Hell yes, I’m in.” Grady swings his leg over the motorcycle, cranks the engine, and motions for Barnes to hop on. “Let’s go.”

 

Barnes isn’t usually speechless.

“What?” Grady says, when he’s been standing there, staring across the valley, for twenty seconds or so.

“She said it was a power plant,” he says.

“Yeah, must be geothermal. What’s the problem?”

“It’s beside a _volcano.”_

“Sure, but it’s probably not active if they put buildings right in front of it.”

“Not loving the sound of _probably,_ there.”

“C’mon, man, do you know what the chances are that an inactive volcano will pick today to explode without any warning?”

“If I’m standing on it? I’m gonna say ninety-nine percent.”

Grady grins, as if Barnes is kidding. “Your luck’s that bad, huh?”

“Pal, you got no idea. I’ve been tortured, experimented on, brainwashed, shot, beat to shit more times than I can count, and chased around two different islands by all kinds of dinosaurs, but you know what I haven’t been yet? Exploded in a fucking volcano, and I’d like to keep it that way!”

“Did you just say ‘brainwashed’?”

“Oh, yeah,” Barnes says, “about that. You should know that if we run into any HYDRA assholes, there’s an outside chance someone’ll start yelling about the Russian space program and I’ll pass out for a couple hours. If that happens, I’m gonna need you to pull me out of there, because if they grab me while I’m under, some really bad shit could go down for both of us. Okay?”

Grady stares at him for several seconds. Then he says, “You lead an interesting life, don’t you, Bucky Barnes?”

“I’ll say this for it, I’m usually not bored.”

“So what’s the plan here?”

Barnes skims his eyes over the valley. The structure at the far end, closest to the volcano, is definitely the power plant, complete with white smoke rising from tall smokestacks. The center of the valley is mostly empty, and there’s a herd of triceratops milling around in it, placidly cropping at the grass. At the near end, there’s a bunker-like building that could potentially hold anything—but the last time he knows of that HYDRA took something this far off the grid, it was Project Valkyrie, which came closer to killing Steve than anything up to and including Barnes himself. He clenches his metal fist, forces himself to breathe, and says, “See that electric fence, behind the bunker? That’s the weak spot.”

“That… looks a lot like a T. Rex paddock,” Grady says, in a tone that suggests he’s trying to sound carefully neutral until he finds out exactly how stupid Barnes is about to be. “You’re not planning to go in there, are you?”

“Of course not, that’d be stupid. I’m planning to let the dinosaur out.” Barnes can’t believe he’s actually saying this like it’s a reasonable course of action. Steve would _love_ this, and if that doesn’t scare the crap out of him, nothing will. “Can I borrow your gun?”

Grady passes it over, and Barnes flattens himself on the ground, bracing the stock against his metal shoulder. “What are you doing?”

“There’s an electrical box that controls that fence. I’m gonna shoot it out and turn off the fence.” Grady looks blank. Barnes points, and says, “Right there, gray box on a post, next to the shed.”

“Heh, funny. Look, my Marlin’s a pretty nice guide gun, but it’s not sniper gear. Even if it had a scope, nobody could make that shot with it.”

 “Nobody, huh?” Barnes grins. “Care to make it interesting?”

“What’s the bet?”

“Loser buys the winner all the beer he can drink.”

“Make it tequila and you’re on.”

Barnes nods briefly, then settles in, aiming the rifle and slowing his breathing until the tension bleeds out of his body and he drops into the zone. When he’s as still and calm as he’ll ever be, breathing out, between heartbeats, he pulls his finger smoothly back on the trigger. The electrical box goes up in a shower of sparks, and Owen Grady says, “Holy fucking shit.”

Barnes forgets he’s not lying next to a fellow Howling Commando long enough to say, “You kiss your ma with that mouth?” just before all hell breaks loose in the InGen compound.

Barnes figured that if there was a Rex inside that fence, it would take a while to figure out that the perimeter was down and it could go free. But maybe the Rex was startled by the gunshot, or maybe this particular one is smarter than most of its species, or maybe it really has an ax to grind with HYDRA. The high-tension wires only shiver the first time it slams its body into them, but after the fifth or sixth try, the fence starts to give way. By then, a dozen HYDRA guards with shock prods and dart guns are scrambling out of the building. Credit where it’s due, Barnes is impressed with the one who seems to be the leader: the guy gets them lined up, weapons ready, before the Rex bursts through the fence and charges. Grady and Barnes both wince when it brings its massive foot down on the man before he can take a single shot.

Now the HYDRA assholes have even bigger problems, because while their leader was getting stomped on, the triceratops have gone insane. They’re up on their feet, trumpeting and stomping, and suddenly the whole herd decides as one that they want to be anywhere but here. Barnes has lived through a lot of bombardments, so maybe a dinosaur stampede isn’t the loudest thing he’s ever heard, but it’s pretty intense. Five or six HYDRA grunts go down under trampling feet, and at least one more falls to a sharp horn that gores his midsection. At the end of it all, only four are still moving, and Barnes picks off two and wings a third before the rifle’s out of bullets. “Thanks,” he says, and hands the gun back to Grady,while the one uninjured HYDRA fighter drags the injured one inside. “You’re right. That is a nice gun.”

“You don’t want to hang onto it?” Grady still looks dazed as he reaches for cartridges to reload.

“You need to be armed for the next part. I’m…” Shit. It’s actually really, really hard to do this without accidental arm jokes. “I have a built-in weapon. Stay behind me, and no heroics. My prosthetic will stop most bullets, and I have what they call a healing factor, so let me handle any serious threats.”

“You’re not getting any arguments from me,” says Grady. But he brings the rifle up, ready, as they move down into the valley.

Barnes smiles to himself when he realizes that Grady’s behind him and to the left. That’s exactly where he used to position himself when he followed Steve into battle, too.

The triceratops have cleared out, and so has the Rex, presumably following the herbivores and looking for a snack. Nobody shoots at Barnes or Grady as they make their way down to the fence, and nothing has jumped out and tried to eat them by the time they reach the paddock. “Shit,” says Grady, inspecting the holes Barnes drilled through the center of the electrical box. “I’ve never seen anybody shoot like that before.”

“Stop it, Owen, you’re makin’ me blush.” Barnes assesses the building. Long and low, with no windows on the lower floor, it’s more like a fortress than a lab. He has a gut feeling that it’s both. He knows for sure that there are at least two HYDRA soldiers inside, one wounded, but there are probably more, and the whole base will be on high alert, if they haven't already called in backup.

Oh, and лёгок на помине, right on cue…

Barnes pulls Grady behind one of the equipment sheds, crouching and motioning for Grady to do the same, so that both of them are hidden in the shadow of a low corrugated-metal roof. Grady’s good enough at this that he doesn’t even have to motion for silence; he just waits, and sees Grady understand when his non-enhanced ears pick up the sound of the helicopter. “Hey, Owen,” he shouts, when the engine is loud enough to cover the sound but not so loud that Grady won’t hear him. “You ever ambush a helicopter before?”

“Is that a thing people do in your world?”

“Just follow my lead, then.” Barnes can’t hold back a grin. “This is gonna be _so much fun.”_

“Shit, man, you’re crazy,” Grady shouts back, but he’s laughing too.

The landing pad, lucky for them and too bad for HYDRA, is on the far side of the equipment sheds. They go in low, sticking close to the outbuildings, and Grady circles around to the copilot’s side while Barnes goes to the pilot’s. Barnes holds up his fingers: _Five, four, three, two,_ and then he darts out, just as the blades are spinning down, and yanks the door halfway off its hinges. He pulls the pilot out, slams his head against the metal side panel before the guy can so much as twitch, drops him, and slides smoothly into the cockpit. The copilot has already shrieked and grabbed for the radio, but Grady’s there on the other side, tapping the barrel of the gun against the window. Barnes gives him a wide smile.

“Hey, pal,” he says, “cooperate and you get to walk away from this. Try to do it the hard way and you take a nice long nap like your buddy down there, capisce?”

Turns out the copilot isn’t interested in being a martyr, not when a crazy guy with a metal arm is grinning at him. Five minutes later, he’s tied up with his own belt, and Barnes is wearing the copilot’s jacket, helmet, and flight goggles, while Grady is wearing the pilot’s. Each of them has a HYDRA-issued sidearm and glory halle-fucking-lujah, the pilot even had a seven-inch Bowie knife that belongs to Barnes now.

He might’ve accidentally growled at Grady a little when they reached for it at the same time. Whoops.

“You ready?” he asks, and Grady nods. He’s wearing an expression that the old Bucky Barnes knew well, an uneasy mix of _I’ve trained for this, I’m good at it, I got this_ and _I’m following a crazy supersoldier with no plan at all into a HYDRA base; how is this my life?_ He’d like to say something reassuring, but it’d be blatant bullshit if he did. He doesn’t know for sure that it’s going to be okay, and people don’t always make it out alive, and if he did what Steve always did to lighten the mood, which was to make a joke about punching Hitler in the face, Grady would probably just look at him funny. So he goes up to the side door of the lab/bunker building and bangs on it instead.

“Access code?” somebody yells at him from inside.

Now’s when he finds out whether the copilot gave him good intel. “Leviathan,” Barnes yells back.

There’s a rattle of locks being undone. Then the door swings open, and they’re in.


	19. Hybrid

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Seeing as I kind of creeped myself out while writing this, I feel obliged to warn that this chapter is a bit grim. I blame Stephen King.

“About goddamn time,” says the rattled-looking medic who lets Barnes and Grady into the bunker. “Whitaker needs medevac twenty minutes ago. This is a mess. We were _never_ supposed to see combat out here. I don’t know whose fuckup it was, but somebody’s gonna—”

Barnes feels kind of shitty about knocking the guy unconscious. It’s one thing to shoot trained fighters who chose to put their lives on the line for evil dinosaur-building Nazis, and he definitely doesn’t have kind feelings towards HYDRA’s medical division. But he also knows what it’s like to be alone in the field, bleeding out, praying for help that isn’t coming. Taking out the medic leaves some guy named Whitaker in the same position, and even a cold-as-ice HYDRA specialist can repent for a lot of stuff when there’s a bullet in their liver.

This is why HYDRA had to wipe his memories so often, Barnes thinks. It’s the same reason Pierce got so cagey when he asked about the man on the bridge. The fastest way to wreck the Asset’s conditioning was to let him think of his targets as people, with names. Better if they were just faces, just missions. Better if they kept him so far away from the subject of names that he didn’t even have one of his own.

Barnes shakes himself and turns to Grady, who’s unclipping a badge from the medic’s coat. “Says all-access. Should get us past any locked doors.”

“Good thinking.” And that’s what Barnes should be doing: thinking about the current mission, not the past. He needs to assess the layout of this place and figure out where Wu will have gone to ground, assuming he’s even here. Gone to ground… oh, shit, that’s not a good thought.

There’s a bank of elevators at the far side of the room. Barnes walks over and holds the badge up to a scanner to open the doors. He ducks inside, looks at the buttons, and sighs. Two stories above ground level, and then more buttons: 1B, 2B, 3B, 4B. “Okay, we got a problem.”

“You mean in addition to HYDRA and dinosaurs?”

“Yeah, it’s not just a secret base by a volcano. It’s a secret _underground_ base by a volcano.” Not that he wanted to jump out any more windows today, but this cuts off a whole lot of potential escape routes. “Want to put money on whether we’ll find Wu on the lowest, creepiest level?”

“No, thanks, already lost one bet today. You’re right, though, this is some serious supervillain stuff. I can’t believe I didn’t see that HYDRA was involved before.”

“Hey, SHIELD overlooked them for seventy years, don’t be too hard on yourself.”

“I guess.” Grady hesitates. “Can I make one little suggestion here?”

“Of course. What is it?”

“There’s a phone on the desk. We could call the Avengers.”

Barnes grins. “Yeah, ‘cause they give you Tony Stark’s personal cell phone number in the SHIELD initiation packet.”

“You can stop pretending you’re just some low-level agent, Bucky. I worked it out a while ago.”

“Worked what out?”

“That you’re Captain America.”

Barnes chokes. _“What?”_

“I _knew_ I’d heard your name before! Took me a while to remember, but I did a report on the Howling Commandos in, like, fifth grade. And honestly, you were being kind of obvious. You made that shot nobody could make, half the stuff that comes out of your mouth sounds like it’s straight out of the 1940s, and I guess the bionic arm explains how you can catch that shield and not break your hand. Don’t worry, I’m not gonna blow your cover. Who’d believe me? But your act could use some work.”

“Owen…” Barnes can’t breathe, he’s laughing so hard. “First off, _Steve Rogers,_ who’s been Captain America since 1943, is a blonde guy who looks nothing at all like me—”

“No, man, I know I’m right. You don’t forget a name like Bucky Barnes. And Captain America always wears a mask when he’s on the news. Who knows what he really looks like?”

“—And for the record,” Barnes wheezes, “I’m pretty sure the living embodiment of truth, justice, and the American way has never cussed anybody out in Russian—”

“So you picked it up in the war. I remember the Commandos did some missions in Russia.”

“Also, between you and me, I’m _way_ better than Rogers at knife fighting. And at shooting. He never put in the effort I did on the firing range. I should be insulted you even compared us.”

“Uh-huh.”

“And that whole thing where he runs in without a plan and just hopes it’s all gonna work out on the power of courage and patriotism? I’ve never been a fan. I mean, my plans aren’t always great, but at least I don’t run smack into the most dangerous possible situation _every single time_. Trust me, Owen, you’re better off with me, unless maybe you’re putting together a team for Ultimate Frisbee.”

“Whatever you say, Buck.”

That, on the other hand, sounds so much like Steve that it makes Barnes’ heart hurt a little. “Stairs,” he says. “Elevators are too risky. We’ll hit each level, clear it out, move down until we find Wu. Yeah?”

“Following your lead, Cap.”

“Jesus.”

There’s an infrared reader on the door to the stairwell. Barnes scans the badge and it opens with a beep. That’s some outdated shit right there. It makes him wonder if HYDRA has deleted his retinal scan from their main computer bank yet. He’s glad he doesn’t have to find out. Wu has almost certainly reported to HQ that he’s alive and kicking by now, which he doesn’t think they knew for sure until today. If Wu has also reported that he’s gone rogue, they’ll be sending a _lot_ of backup. Maybe Wu’s ego will keep him from reporting Barnes’ escape until he’s sure he can’t either recapture or kill him. Barnes sure as hell hopes so.

 _Ready?_ he mouths to Grady, drawing his gun and resting his metal hand on the door handle of Floor 1B.

Grady’s all business now, his mouth a straight line, eyes intense. _Ready._

Barnes kicks open the door and goes in with the pistol at eye level, which makes it anticlimactic that there are only two people in the room: a man and a woman in lab coats. They both yelp and raise their hands before he even gets in a good glare. Jeez, they do _not_ make evil henchmen like they used to.

“Over there,” he says, gesturing at them with the gun. Then he takes stock of the room, and his heart sinks. The floor is mostly one big room, and it’s filled with tanks. Only two of them are full cryo units, but there are aquariums too, full of bubbling water or, in some cases, blueish or greenish gases. Several of them contain living things, slithering or swimming or just wriggling. “Search those two,” he instructs Grady, while he checks out the array of buttons on the outside of the nearer cryo chamber. There’s something in it, but the window in front is frosted over, so he can’t see what. “You, Duvall,” he says, after he checks the woman’s nametag. “What’s the code to open this?”

“That’s what you want?” she asks, shakily. “You’re here for the assets?”

Most of Barnes goes still, but the metal plates in his left arm shift once, then settle into place. “The what?”

“I just…” Duvall is shaking. “You, you came for—we were supposed to be _safe_ here—”

“You want safe, maybe don’t work for the bad guys,” Grady mutters, which would be Barnes’ thoughts exactly, if he could think. Right now it’s all he can do to keep himself from destroying something.

“How. Do. I. Open. This.” he says, biting off the words.

“The code is 39625,” the woman stammers.

“You can’t—you’ll kill it,” the guy—Briggs, his nametag says—starts to protest, but Grady nudges him with the barrel of the rifle and he falls silent. Barnes punches in the numbers, then hits a button marked _Activate_. There’s a clank and a hiss from somewhere inside the cryo chamber, and the front plate unlocks. He swings it open with his left hand. A blast of escaping cold air hits him in the face, a smell like frost with chemicals in it, and he closes his eyes long enough to tell himself, firmly, that he is _not_ going to lose his shit over a couple of lousy sense memories.

When he opens them again, he’s staring into the face of the new HYDRA asset.

The thing that’s curled up in the tank looks like it’s mostly velociraptor, but there are differences. It’s got a rounder head, a shorter neck, a blunted jawline that probably holds a lot fewer teeth. Its eyes are closed; its skin is a muddled tan-and-green color. But there’s something _wrong_ about it. It’s not until his gaze travels down to the end of its limbs that he sees that under the scaly skin, the hands at the end of the forelimbs are almost perfectly human. And once he sees that, it all of the other weird pieces fall into place: the musculature that mirrors a human’s under the scales, the skull that’s the right shape to hold a human brain.

If he pried open its eyes, would they be reptile or human?

Barnes’ stomach turns over. If he’d eaten anything since lunch yesterday, he’s pretty sure he’d be losing it right now. He leans forward to brace himself against the side of the cryo tank, and then he sees the metal tag implanted behind what looks like a scale-covered ear. It almost doesn’t matter what the thing is: a tracking device, a homing beacon, something to do with mind control—whatever the reason, HYDRA has been poking around in this thing’s brain.

“Buck,” Grady says, “you okay?” and that’s when Briggs, goddammit, decides they’re both distracted enough for him to play hero.

Barnes puts two bullets in Briggs within seconds of his lunge, one in the chest and one in the abdomen, but he’s already grabbed a black box from the table and thrust it at Grady, who falls hard, convulsing. That leaves the woman unguarded, and she’s barely taken her first step to run away when Barnes’ third bullet catches her in the side. She shrieks and drops. Barnes slides to the floor beside Grady, grabs the wires with his left hand, and sweeps the prongs of the taser away from him. “Hey,” he says, grabbing Grady’s shoulder. “Hey, you’re okay. Owen, look at me. _Breathe,_ Owen.”

Grady does, in a long, agonized gasp. “Mother _fucker,”_ he says. And then, opening one eye and watching Barnes for a minute, he adds raggedly, “What, no crack about my language?”

Barnes lets out the breath he was holding. He recognizes whistling in the dark—hell, he’s a champion at it—but if Grady still cares enough to put on a brave front after he’s taken 50,000 volts to the chest, he’ll be fine. “Those things are serious business,” he says. “Last time I got hit with that kind of voltage, I screamed like a little girl.” Granted, it was going through his skull and into his brain, but it still stands out as some of the worst pain he’s ever felt.

“Well, if Captain America says it’s bad…”

“Owen,” Barnes says, offering Grady his hand to help him up, “you gotta quit with that stuff. I’m really not Captain America.”

“You act like him,” Grady mumbles, as he gets to his feet.

“I don’t…” Wait. _Does_ he? Shit, maybe he does. In fact, he thinks he’s about to do it again. But first, he goes back to the cryo tank.

Bringing a living thing out of cryo is a tricky process. He’s read up on the internet about how they got Steve out of the ice, how they had to keep the temperature consistent across his body while he thawed, how apparently once he warmed up enough, the serum started his heart again in a way that had never been seen by medical science before (except that he suspects it had, with _him,_ but whoever wrote the article didn’t know that). The point is, if this… creation of HYDRA’s is allowed to thaw without exactly the right controls and the right injections of chemicals at the right times, it won’t come back to life. It’ll just lie in its steel coffin and rot.

He puts his metal fist through the control panel hard enough that the tank will never serve its purpose again, then pushes the lid back into place. If Grady can shake off getting tased, he can handle seeing the hybrid, but that doesn’t mean he should have to. Barnes, on the other hand, has enough nightmares already that one more won’t make that much difference.

“Hey,” he says, walking over to the woman, who’s quietly sobbing where she fell. She’s obviously in a lot of pain, but her color’s good and he doesn’t think she’s in shock. Looks like his bullet glanced off a rib; there’s not enough blood for that shot to have hit anything vital—unlike Briggs, who’s been dead almost since he hit the floor. “Duvall. You made a stupid choice working for HYDRA, but you aren’t as dumb as your partner, and there’s no reason you can’t walk away from this. How about you cooperate with me and I’ll put in a good word when SHIELD gets here?”

“Y-y-y—”

He’ll take it as a yes. “Tell me about these… things.” Can’t quite bring himself to say the other word yet.

Duvall takes a while to answer. He’s just about to repeat the question when she says, “I didn’t think it would work.”

“I don’t believe you were doing mad science for fun. Try again.”

“It was just supposed to be an _experiment_. Even if we didn’t get viable embryos, I thought we’d learn things that… that would’ve revolutionized how we treated diseases and genetic defects… but they didn’t care about the science. They just wanted the results.”

Oh, Lord, another of these ‘I only joined HYDRA because they said I could do some good’ people. When are humans going to figure out that there are _always_ other humans who’ll take their best intentions and twist them into something horrible? “What did they tell you to do? Give it to me in small words.”

“They wanted… soldiers,” she says. “Soldiers who were as tough as dinosaurs. Who had dinosaur traits. InGen always made their dinosaurs by filling in gaps in the genetic code with DNA from other animals. They wanted us to… to make gaps in the human genome and fill it in with DNA from dinosaurs.”

“Where did you get the human DNA? Was it from the Red Room?”

“I don’t know anything about it! They gave it to us. They said it was from some super-soldier experiment back in the 1950s.”

 _“Himmeldonnerwetter noch mal,”_ Barnes says, and then makes himself stop and take a breath. It's really bad news for his sanity if he's unintentionally slipping into German now. He opens his mouth to ask her the obvious follow-up question, whether it was Project Rebirth or Проект Зима Солдат, but then he realizes he’s not sure which would be worse, if the thing in the tank is part Steve or part him.

“But we never really got what they wanted,” Duvall says. “The hybrids always came out more animal than human. Doctor Wu thought it had something to do with the dinosaur genes being more resilient—”

“You know Henry Wu?” Barnes says.

“Y-yes? I mean, I’ve met him—”

“Is he in this building?”

“Not… exactly.”

“Then tell me where he is _exactly_.”

“The sub-basement, the fourth floor down, it connects to some caves that go down to the river. They use them to move things to boats, sometimes.” Duvall is starting to look a little chalky. “Please, I’m just Level Three, I don’t think he even knows who I am—”

“I’m not looking for a hostage.” He can’t believe he’s doing this, but he says, “Look, patch yourself up, then go upstairs and see if you can help anybody who needs medical attention. If people from SHIELD show up, put your hands up and surrender quietly, then tell them everything you told me. If you do that, I’ll ask them to go easy on you.”

She really can’t be hurt too badly, judging by how fast she makes it through the door. “She won’t do it,” Grady says, after the door to the stairwell slams behind her. “She’ll run, or worse, she’ll set a trap for your friends when they get here.”

“Maybe.” Barnes crosses the room to the second cryo tank and puts his fist through the controls for that one, too, without opening it. Everything else in the tanks can wait until he's finished the rest of his business here.

Henry Wu has just used up his second chance to prove he’s more human than the things he builds in his labs. He won’t get a third. Barnes reloads the pistol and looks over at Grady. “You know,” he says, “this is my fight, but it doesn’t have to be yours. You just got hit pretty bad for me, and I can't ask you to keep taking your chances. I won't think any less of you if you want to head upstairs and wait for SHIELD to get here.”

“I’m not quitting now.”

“Listen, you better not be doing this because you’re afraid of letting Captain America down. Because I told you, I’m not him.”

“Aw, Barnes, that’s not why I’m here,” Grady says. “I’m not doing this to impress anybody. I’m doing this because it’s right. I’m with you.”

“Okay,” Barnes says. “Good. Because we’re almost there, I think.”

“There? Where are we going?”

Barnes gives him a tense smile. “To the end of the line.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I keep raising the number of chapters I expect to write because I'm having so much fun. :)


	20. The Opposite of Fine

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> OK, folks, I’m taking you at your word that you don’t mind if this gets a little longer, since that means I get to add more raptors and snark.

Level 2B is almost as bad as Level 1B, because it has things in cages instead of tanks.

Once he’s sure the animals are test subjects rather than experiments, Barnes’ metal hand makes quick work of each cage lock. He frees mice, rats, rabbits, pigs—pigs, really?—frogs, two kinds of monkeys, and a couple of cats, after he figures the mice have a reasonable head start. The animals look well-fed and healthy, but that doesn’t help, because technically, so did the Asset.

“The thing is,” he says to Grady, when they’re halfway down the floor, heading for the next set of stairs, “when I was a kid, I had this friend who was real little and got sick all the time, and if you’d asked me then, I would’ve said, ‘They’re just animals, do as many experiments as you want if it helps you fix my friend.’ And I might still say that if they were actually helping people, but this…”

“Yeah, I’m not exactly PETA material myself, but this is over the line,” Grady says. And then, after a minute, “Must’ve been rough on your buddy, what with the Depression and all.”

Barnes briefly considers telling him exactly how rough it was to be a kid with asthma and heart trouble in 1932, the year Steve almost died, but it’s a long story and he has no idea where to start, so he just says, “You’re an asshole, Owen. That’s a quality I admire in a person,” and smashes a couple more locks.

They don’t find any humans on 2B, but on 3B, some scientist types who are more enterprising than Briggs and Duvall have set up an ambush in a lab off the main hallway. Barnes realizes something isn’t right in time to bring his left arm up and shield himself from the first volley of shots, but there’s no room to dodge in this narrow space, and a bullet nicks his right arm when he spins to return fire. There’s also no room to mess around in these close quarters; this is a time for kill shots. He drops three of them quickly, one after another, and Grady takes care of the other two with the rifle.

Barnes is offended. Only five, and only basic weapons training, and they thought they had a chance? Apparently the stories about him aren’t getting around the way they did during the Cold War. Well, either that or Wu set them up as cannon fodder. He does a quick search of the bodies, but they’ve managed to waste every last one of their bullets—goddamn _amateurs—_ and there’s nothing worth taking. “How’s your ammo situation?” he asks Grady.

“Getting low. Don’t suppose they’ve got anything we can—shit, Barnes, one of them hit you!”

Barnes looks down at his arm and shrugs. It’s not bad. Another quarter-inch and it would’ve missed him completely. “Oh, yeah, I guess. What are you doing?”

“What am I doing? You got shot!” Grady’s already across the lab, pulling a first-aid kit down from the wall. “I’m not gonna suggest we turn back for a little thing like a bullet wound, because, y’know, that would be stupid, but you should patch it up before we go on.”

“Just grazed me. Can’t even call it a through-and-through.” Now that they’re this close, he grudges every second of delay between him and Wu. “Let’s keep going. It’s fine.”

“Yeah, well, normal people think getting shot is the _opposite_ of fine, you lunatic! …Okay, do I even want to know what’s wrong with you that you think that’s funny?”

He’s laughing because he remembers yelling almost exactly the same thing at Steve, once. Okay, past Barnes, point taken. He’ll take his medicine like a good little super-assassin. And while he does, nobody will drug him, or restrain him, or make him sit in the Chair. It’s so weird to have friends instead of handlers.

Then, once he’s patched up, they move on to 4B.

 

The first thing he notices about the lowest sub-basement is that it’s cold. Not cryo-cold, just underground cold, like they’re not bothering to pump in any heat. It makes sense when he rounds a corner and finds racks upon racks of computer equipment, most of it either blinking little lights at him or whirring quietly. “This isn’t so bad,” he says to Grady, in his quietest tone, as they move forward. “Figured we’d find more of those hybrids down here, not a bunch of machines.”

“Yeah? Then how come you look nervous?”

“Nervous? Not me.” Barnes squares his shoulders and lifts his chin. “ _I’m_ strong and brave, here to save the American way.”

His Steve impression is wasted on Grady, which is a shame, because it’s a really good impression. But at least Grady smiles at the reference before he says, “It is a trap, though.”

“Course it is.” Barnes sighs. “Hail fuckin’ HYDRA.”

“You’re gonna walk right into it, aren’t you?”

“Course I am.”

Some days, it’s a real bitch being the good guy.

Actually, though, being the good guy doesn’t have to mean being completely stupid. “Hang on,” he says, and gives the racks a quick once-over for anything lying around loose. Too bad he doesn’t have the Asset’s belt; that little grenade would be perfect right now. All he can find is a flashlight, but when you’ve got a metal arm that can throw, say, a vibranium shield hard enough to stagger Captain America, you can make a pretty good noise by throwing a flashlight down a hall into a rack of servers.

When the first raptor’s head pokes out from the racks, Grady puts a shot between its eyes with the rifle, but a sharp scuttle of retreating claws tells Barnes that three, four, maybe even five more of them just thought better of doing the same thing. _Shit._ He was hoping he wouldn’t have any more dinosaurs to deal with today. And now they’ll be leery of the humans, which means they’re going to get trickier.

The options for retreat are limited—the raptors could easily sneak back between him and the stairwell—and besides, the only way to Wu is through the door with the glowing red EXIT sign at the far end of the room. But 4B is a maze, one big room full of floor-to-ceiling shelves of machines whirring loudly enough to cover reptilian breathing, and the raptors are smart enough to use it. “How many shots do you have left, exactly?” he asks Grady.

“I have… four, between the rifle and the pistol. You?”

“Maybe three. Goddammit.” Not even two bullets per raptor. He doesn’t like those odds. “Any ideas?”

“Only a really stupid one.”

“Can’t be worse than some I’ve been part of. Let’s hear it.”

Grady hands his rifle to Barnes and tucks his pistol into his belt. “I’ll draw them out, you get behind one of these racks and do your sniper thing, and we both hope you make a kill with every shot.”

“Owen, I can’t let you do that,” Barnes starts to argue, but Grady’s already moving. He’s obviously seen the same thing Barnes has: their only reasonable chance here is to set up their own ambush, and Barnes is the better shot. So Barnes kneels, settling into a solid firing stance, and points the rifle out between two shelves of humming electronics while Grady walks out into the center of the room. “Hey,” Grady shouts, planting his feet wide and raising his arms. “Hey, raptors! Yeah, that’s right, I’m talking to you. You want me? Come out here and get me.”

Grady is projecting something different with his body language now, Barnes can see, than he did when he worked with his raptor squad. There, he was saying, _This is my space. You listen to me._ Here, he’s issuing a challenge: _I’m in your space, what are you gonna do about it?_ It’s a fine distinction, and Grady has it calculated down to the smallest shift of his weight. Barnes has worked with a lot of badasses over the years, but he’s sure very few of them could keep their cool like this, walking out in front of a pack of killer dinosaurs and practically ringing a dinner bell.

It’s incredible to watch a real professional at work. …And it’s also hot as hell, he’s not gonna lie. Unfortunately, he’ll have to file that thought away for a time when there are no velociraptors bearing down on them.

Two of the carnivores have come out of the stacks now, snaking their heads around the corners first, then emerging slowly, slinking forward. Barnes wishes he knew exactly how far they could jump, because he wants all of them in the open before he fires at any of them. One down and they didn’t get that cautious, but his gut says that if he makes one more kill and doesn’t get all of the others within seconds, then Team Stegosaurus is going down for the count.

Grady grins at the raptors, beckoning them on, and Barnes wonders: Is reckless stupidity actually contagious? Is it something he caught from Steve and passed on to Grady? The third raptor slinks out of a side corridor when they’re halfway to him, and Barnes thinks, _Come on, I know there’s at least one more of you bastards, come_ on _,_ and Grady, in his element and clearly on some kind of adrenaline high, laughs and says, “Only three on one? You sure there’s nobody else you want to bring to the party?,” and then, finally, the fourth head comes into view, low and sinuous, almost down on the floor. This will have to do.

Barnes has them in his sights, left to right, and they’re lined up like dominos waiting for him to knock them down. He’s in the kill zone, and it’s beautiful, in its way, just like it always is; he’s keenly aware of the steady rhythms of his breath, his heartbeat, his prey. When he pulls the trigger, he hardly notices the crack of the bullet, or the recoil of the gun against his metal shoulder as the shot hits the first raptor right between its eyes. He moves on to the second raptor before the first hits the ground, shatters its skull with another flawless shot, and drops the empty rifle, reaching for the pistol in the same smooth motion. The third raptor springs while Grady hits the deck, and Barnes drills that one neatly through the eye. It’s clockwork, it’s perfect, in moments like this he thinks maybe it’s what he was born to do, and he’s just about to pull the trigger on the last one that’s coming at Grady when the fifth raptor, the one that sneaked around behind him, hits him in the small of the back and knocks him sprawling.

 

What Barnes told Grady earlier is true: he _does_ make plans, and they’re generally better than Steve’s plans, or complete lack thereof. But his instincts were conditioned for trouble a long time before he ever saw action in the European theater, and that means that sometimes he does his best work when he’s not overthinking it. He got his first lesson in dealing with attacks from behind not long after the very first fight he ever jumped into at Steve’s side, when some of the kids down the street decided to get him back for ruining their fun, and now it’s as much Brooklyn as Italy and Austria and Poland and Russia that makes Barnes lean into the fall, roll with the weight of the raptor, and kick hard with both legs as soon as his back is flat on the floor. The raptor flies across the room and he whips his knife into the animal’s jugular vein, but its momentum carries it forward, jaws open; it’s fountaining blood, but if those jaws close around his flesh arm, or worse, his throat, he’s not going to care that he took it down with him.

Barnes comes to his feet, and his left hand forms a fist, metal plates shifting and locking. The raptor is close enough for him to feel its hot, reeking breath on his face when he brings his wrist up, every spring and motor in the arm working in unison. The concrete-splitting punch is more than capable of shattering bone, and the raptor’s lower jaw crumples under it. This time the raptor flies backward and crashes into a metal frame full of electronics, tail lashing wildly, and then it falls and doesn’t get up again.

Barnes hears Grady’s pistol fire twice, and then his very least favorite sound in the world: the click of a dry fire. He yanks the knife out of the raptor’s scaly flesh and runs out from behind the racks, praying he isn’t too late. Grady is on his back, with the last raptor still on its feet above him, gutshot and bleeding but still moving in for the kill. Нет, пожалуйста, he thinks, running toward the dinosaur and knowing he can’t possibly get there in time to save Grady’s life. Then the raptor’s body goes rigid just before its teeth can sink into Grady’s neck, and then Barnes _is_ there and he’s got his metal fist under its jaw, choking it with his left hand while he slices with the right, and it lets out one last hissing animal shriek before he shoves its twitching carcass aside.

Grady is already getting back on his feet, scuffed and rattled but miraculously unharmed, and Barnes is about to ask how the hell that’s possible when he sees the taser in Grady’s hand. Barnes didn’t even realize Grady brought it along. He drops the knife, shoves his hair out of his face with both hands, and says, “For fuck’s sake, Owen, that was the dumbest plan I’ve seen in seventy years.”

“Oh, so you… admit it, then?” Grady pants. “Oh, man, tell me that’s mostly raptor blood.”

Barnes looks down. Yeah, so much for his attempts to bandage himself up earlier, much less Grady’s fussing about the barely-a-bullet-wound. The raptor never managed to close its teeth on him, or else he’d be signing up for at least one more metal limb right now, but he’s got fresh claw marks down his side, although his ribcage stopped it from puncturing anything critical. He twists to check out the damage, draws a sharp breath as the skin pulls tight, and presses what's left of his shirt on that side against the worst of the gashes.

Great. This was one of his last reasonably intact shirts, not counting the one he managed to turn pink in the wash when he was trying to figure out how to do twenty-first-century laundry. _Je me fais chier aujourd'hui_.

Grady watches Barnes inspect his injuries for a few seconds, and Barnes sees it in his face the moment he decides to call it in, but he isn’t quick enough to stop him from switching on his earpiece. “SHIELD, this is Grady,” he says. “Do you read?”

Barnes activates his own comms in time to hear Coulson say, “Grady, I hope you and Barnes have a _very_ good explanation for what you’re doing right now.”

“Yeah, we don’t,” Barnes says, because even if Coulson technically can’t do any more than lecture them from a distance, it goes against his principles to let Grady take the rap. “It’s my fault. I did what you said not to and dragged Grady into it and we kind of knocked over a HYDRA base full of mutant dinosaurs. …Sorry.”

If a picture is worth a thousand words, Coulson’s sigh is worth at least twenty-five hundred. “Are you both okay?”

“No, that’s why I’m calling,” Grady says. “Barnes needs a medic.”

“I’m _fine,”_ says Barnes.

“Barnes needs a medic,” Grady says, “because he’s been shot and mauled and jumped out a window already today and the next time he says he’s fine, I’m going to beat his face in.”

“I didn’t jump out the window,” Barnes protests. “I got _pushed_ out the window. I don’t jump off things that much. I’m not _Steve.”_

“Who the hell is Steve?” says Grady.

“Barnes,” Coulson begins, but Barnes cuts him off.

“Look, after I get Wu, I’ll spend as much time in SHIELD Medical as you want,” he says, which is a damn generous offer for him, given how much he hates situations where people can poke him with needles. “But until I do, I’m not quitting. You called me a consultant, Phil, not an agent. Well, that means I don’t answer to you. I don’t answer to anybody anymore. But I am your expert on HYDRA, and I can promise you that your window to catch this guy is closing fast and I’m your best chance to stop him. If you want to help me do that, hurry up that backup Skye promised. If you don’t, just let me do my job. Either way, this is the right thing to do and I’m doing it.”

There’s a brief silence while Coulson and Grady both digest that, and Barnes fights a moment of irrational panic while his brain tries to tell him that he just defied a CO, what was he _thinking,_ they put you in the _Chair_ for things like that. Then Coulson does the sigh again, and this time it’s practically a State of the Union address. “Backup is incoming,” he says. “Leave your comms on. I want her to be able to find you easily.”

Her, huh? May’s injuries must be lighter than Skye made them sound. That’s good news for everybody. “Thanks. And, Owen, I told you, you don’t have to come with me—”

“No way. If I can’t stop you, at least I’m not going to be the guy who lets a national hero get killed because he went up against HYDRA practically unarmed.”

“Really, Owen?” says Barnes. “Two amputees on the line and you went there with the arm thing?”

“Wh—oh, Jesus, man, I’m sorry, I wasn’t think—” He scowls when Barnes grins at him. It’s an impressive scowl, much better than Steve’s. “You’re an asshole.”

“You’re just now figuring that out?”

“‘National hero’?” Coulson asks.

“Oh, yeah, Phil, I should bring you up to speed on that,” Barnes says, carefully straight-faced. “We can drop the act now. Owen told me he figured out that I’m secretly Captain America.”

Coulson’s line goes silent for several seconds. When his voice comes back, it’s almost steady. “I want a sitrep as soon as anything changes,” he says. “Good luck, Barnes.”

“Thanks,” he says, because he’s probably going to need it.

 

The exit at the end of 4B leads to an access tunnel that takes a shortcut under the jungle and comes out downhill from the lab building, in a natural cave near a small beach. They’re even closer to the base of the volcano here, but that isn’t his biggest problem right now. There’s a boat straight ahead of them, tied up at a small dock. Small passenger boats are an area where Barnes has surprisingly little experience, other than occasionally blowing one up from a distance with a rocket launcher—and it’s really too bad Grady only had the one rocket—but this one looks big enough and sturdy enough to give a couple of passengers a comfortable ride back to the mainland, and maybe even bring along a few of those cryo chambers in the hold. Only the best for HYDRA’s mad science division, apparently.

There are three people on the boat. Barnes pegs one of them as the captain, because he’s armed and looks authoritative, and the second as a first mate, or whatever you have when it’s a boat run by two people, because he’s not armed and is hauling boxes around the deck. The third person is Henry Wu.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> At no point did I seriously consider having Grady and the raptors settle their differences via a dance-off. *hides manuscript pages behind back, whistling innocently*
> 
> Edit to add: OK, so later on [I went back and did the thing](http://archiveofourown.org/works/5109599) and yes, I am heartily ashamed of myself.


	21. Harmonic Tremor

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Well, folks, I had a choice between writing a nice, reasonable end to the story or going completely ludicrously over the top, so I hope you enjoy my choice.

“So there’s three of them,” says Grady, “and two of us, and we’ve got—how many shots are left in the pistol?”

“Two,” Barnes tells him.

“—Two shots, which, best case, leaves one guy standing to return fire. Other than that, we’ve got one knife, two empty guns, a taser that’s out of charges, and whatever badassery you and your metal arm can come up with on the spot.”

“You changing your mind?”

“No, but when I’m going to do something stupid, I like to know exactly how screwed I am beforehand.”

That strikes Barnes as a very Russian approach. He approves. “I think we can pull this off. They don’t know we only have two bullets left. Plus, you forgot to list my rugged good looks and charming personality.”

“We are so screwed.”

Barnes grins and hands him the pistol. “I’m gonna surprise them. Go uphill a little and cover me. If they try to start any trouble, put a bullet between Wu’s feet.”

“That’s a long shot with a handgun.”

“And what a fuckin’ tragedy it’ll be if you hit him by accident.”

“I see your point.”

The three men on the boat are absorbed in their work—well, Wu is berating the captain in Spanish, and the two sailors are trying to work around him—and Barnes is able to get fairly close to them undetected before he shouts, “Freeze, Henry! We have you surrounded!”

The captain reaches for his gun, and a bullet thunks into the deck just inches from Wu’s left shoe. Grady has been under-selling his handgun skills.  “Tell him to drop it, Wu,” Barnes orders.

“Кудрявка,” Wu spits, but with no real hope, and nothing happens. So it was a one-time shutdown code after all. Then, when Barnes steps out of cover, leveling a gun at them that they don’t know is empty, he shouts at the crewmen, _“¡No escuchéis! ¡Encendeis las bengalas!”_

It figures that Barnes is completely useless in Spanish, so he can’t countermand Wu’s order. But the captain is smart enough to see where this is headed, and he carefully drops his pistol and kicks it across the deck, with his hands raised. The mate also puts his hands up, and Barnes waits to see if Wu’s going to do this the hard way or the easy way.

Wu must be thinking that the end result will be the same for him either way, because he picks the hard one. When he breaks, and dives for a box in the stern of the boat, Barnes sprints toward him, boots pounding on the wooden dock. He hears the crack of the last bullet and sees Wu stumble. Grady winged him, but it isn’t enough to stop him; he already has a weapon in his hands and he fires it, but not at Barnes, just into the air. It’s… a flare gun? The fuck is he doing with a flare gun, calling reinforcements? Waste of time. Barnes will be gone long before help arrives.

He seizes Wu and drags him to his feet, while the two crewmen stare at him, hands still in the air. “Henry Wu is mine,” he says, and then he grabs Wu by the throat with his metal hand and throws him off the boat and onto the dock, where he lands on his knees. “He stays. You can go. Understand?”

“Yes, yes, we understand,” says the captain. “You take scientist, we go.” Suddenly, unexpectedly, he grins at Barnes. “Scientist is an asshole anyway.”

Barnes returns the grin. Not HYDRA, then, these guys; just some locals who got dragged into something way beyond them. The Asset would’ve cut them down without a second thought, which makes it all the more satisfying that Barnes can let them live. It’s like a personal little fuck-you to his former handlers. He still confiscates the captain’s handgun and makes them dump their cargo into the water—no cryo tanks, but several boxes of computers and backup drives get a nice bath—and after he jumps back onto the dock, the boat is underway within moments.

Barnes grabs Wu by the collar and jerks him into an upright position, with the gun pointed at his temple. Wu is turning out to be a tougher bastard than Barnes gave him credit for. Despite having been shot and throttled and having a scruffy, blood-covered assassin with a metal arm glowering down at him with murder in his eyes, he’s still making an excellent show of defiance. “Do whatever you want to me,” he says between clenched teeth, “it won’t make any difference in the long run. HYDRA will come for you, James. Now that they know you're alive, they’ll never stop coming for you. Cut off one head, and two more—”

Barnes socks him in the jaw, and Wu drops like a sack of potatoes.

He fucking _hates_ that speech.

 

“So we got the bad guy,” Grady says in his earbud, after a moment of—Barnes hopes—impressed silence. “Now what?”

“Now we tie him up and wait for Coulson’s team to get here.” Barnes grabs Wu’s unconscious body by the shoulders and starts dragging him back toward the tunnel. “Personally, I’d love to kill him, but Coulson will probably want to interrogate him, make sure there’s nothing _else_ HYDRA’s up to here. And that there are no more of those hybrids stashed anywhere else. Can you find some straps or rope or something to tie him up?”

“I’ll look around,” Grady says.

He sounds as uncomfortable with the situation as Barnes feels, and Barnes sighs. They both know there’s something that isn’t right about this. Barnes hesitates to call any mission that required punching a velociraptor _easy_ , but this wasn’t hard enough. Unlike the HYDRA grunts who thought they stood a chance against him, Wu has read the Asset’s file, and he should have assumed Barnes was going to be just as ruthless. He should’ve had backup plans for his backup plans, and when Barnes showed up, he should’ve either run or fought, not started messing around with a damn flare gun. “Hey, what was with the flare?” he asks. “I don’t think he was signaling HYDRA. They never go low-tech when high-tech will do.”

“It's not an InGen security protocol, either. Hell, the only thing we use any kind of flare for in Jurassic World is—” Grady draws a sharp breath.

“Hey, you okay? Did something happen?”

“Bucky, you need to get back here _right now,”_ says Grady.

The warning is only seconds too late. Barnes looks up, in the direction of the access tunnel, and he sees the movement in the jungle, and then he understands. That _was_ Wu’s backup plan. He knew there was no getting away from the former Asset. He must have thought that if Barnes caught up to him, his best chance was to create enough of a diversion to either escape or take Barnes down with him. It’s his version of the cyanide pill the HYDRA agents used to pop when they got caught, only bigger, and louder, and with more teeth. And if Barnes tries to get back to Grady and the safety of the access tunnel, he’ll be running right toward it.

So he runs in the opposite direction, which, of course, is toward the volcano.

“Grady, you better be about to tell me those flares are how you attract some really nice friendly stegosauruses at feeding time,” he yells, but he knows, a long time before the ruddy brown head of the Tyrannosaurus Rex breaks through the trees. He’s moving out of the jungle now, into a wide-open plain of volcanic rock, and it’s stupid, _stupid,_ because he’s going to be easy to spot, but it’s not like the jungle offers all that much more protection. Not when he’s leaving a perfectly good trail of blood drops that it can almost certainly follow by scent.

At least the terrain out here is rocky and uneven enough to provide some cover. He throws himself down behind an outcropping as the dinosaur stomps out of the jungle. Nope, not as scary as the Indominus Rex, but getting eaten by the _second_ worst dinosaur is not exactly the consolation prize Barnes had in mind.

At least he isn’t the dinosaur’s first target. The first place it goes is straight for the dock, and Wu’s unconscious body. It lowers its massive snout and sniffs at him, like a dog inspecting something to see if it’s edible.

Wu stirs, and opens his eyes, and sees the T. Rex looming above him, opening its mouth, and Barnes thinks, okay, Wu was a seriously evil bastard, maybe in his personal top ten of evil bastards, which is saying something when you’ve met both Armin Zola and the actual Red Skull, but even he doesn’t deserve for this to be his way to go.

Then he remembers the Red Room girls, and the hybrids, and the Indominus Rex killing its way across Isla Nublar for fun. He remembers that Wu had read his file and knew exactly who and what the Asset really was when they brought him to Wu in Siberia, and that he did nothing, just took the blood and tissue samples he wanted and let the handlers shove him back into cryo, and he thinks:  _Yes, he does._

Wu is screaming when the Rex lifts him in its jaws. He’s still screaming when it tosses him up and catches him out of the air, like a cat playing with a mouse. A very short time after that, the screaming stops.

Then the T. Rex raises its head and sniffs the air. There’s blood on its jaws. Even to Barnes, that looks like an awful lot of blood. And then it turns its head toward him and Barnes thinks, _Shit, shit, shit._

The Rex starts to move in his direction, and Barnes figures that if he has a choice between being caught lying on the ground and caught while running like hell, he’s going to try running. He pushes himself up with the metal arm and sprints higher up the volcanic plain.

The ground starts to rise steeply as he goes, and he already knows his best bet to beat a dinosaur is to use the terrain against it, so he runs flat out, making for the point where the rocky ground meets the base of a cliff. He braces his foot on the first ledge he can find and gropes for a handhold with his metal fingers, using the arm to hoist himself up as far as he can and digging the toes of his boots into the cracks in the rock.

The Rex is… oh, maybe forty feet tall, so he needs to climb at least fifty feet to get out of range. Fortunately, he has a good climbing surface, maybe a seventy-degree angle, rough stone with plenty of good chunky handholds. This isn’t so bad. He’s made worse climbs. He’s just going to focus on keeping three solid points of contact with the stone at all times, and not think about the fact that he’s never done this while he was being chased by a dinosaur before. And he’s definitely not going to think about the fact that he and mountains have historically not gotten along.

He doesn’t look back to see how far away the Rex is, but when the ground starts to shake behind him, he knows it’s close. He boosts himself up, one more handhold, that’s it, then one more toehold in the rock, and the Rex’s teeth snap uselessly at the air, just below him.

Barnes flattens himself against the cliff and makes the mistake of looking down just as the Rex roars. Its breath is vile. He can see straight down into its open jaws and there are still pieces of Wu’s clothes in its teeth and oh God, maybe even some pieces of Wu, and he really, really never needs this kind of view again. _I’m the one who set you free, you stupid goddamn animal,_ he thinks, but it doesn’t know that and it wouldn’t care if it did. Right now it’s just interested in catching its prey, and when it jumps up and slams itself against the rock, it comes perilously close to the heel of his boot.

Jesus, most of its teeth are longer than his Bowie knife. He has to get higher. He grabs another handhold and hoists himself further up, stopping only when he’s in a position he can hold indefinitely. His right hand is scraped raw and bleeding from the porous rock, but his metal fingers should be able to grip the stone all day.

And he might have to, because the Rex isn’t showing any signs of losing interest in him. In fact, now it’s throwing itself against the cliff face, trying to jolt him loose, and the way it sends shudders through the rock is _definitely_ not at all reminiscent of how a train shakes when it’s moving, because if it was, Barnes might just be losing his mind right about now.

“Bucky!” somebody shouts, over the comms.

Barnes looks over his shoulder and sees something unexpected and completely beautiful: a SHIELD helicopter. Finally, his fucking backup. “About time you showed your face, M—” he starts to say, but then he sees that May isn’t in the cockpit at all. He doesn’t recognize the pilot, but the person in the copilot’s seat is definitely Skye. She’s dressed up in sleek black tactical gear, and she’s wearing some kind of strange metallic wrist braces that don’t look like any combat equipment he’s ever seen before. “Skye, tell me some good news,” he says. “Tell me you have a rocket launcher on that bird.”

“We’ve got something better than that,” she shouts back. “Can you hold on up there if things get a little shaky for a minute?”

“I’d really prefer if you didn’t use any explosives on this mountain right now, if that’s what you’re thinking!”

“Just hold on! And trust me!”

She leans out of the helicopter, hand outstretched, palm pointed toward the dinosaur like Iron Man about to fire one of those blaster things, although her gloves don't seem to have any kind of built-in weapon. He sees her take a breath and close her eyes. Then the ground under the T. Rex starts to shake under the dinosaur’s massive hind feet. Loose rocks go sliding in all directions, and the dinosaur lurches, wobbling as it fights to stay upright.

Barnes can feel some vibrations coming up through the cliff, too, but nothing like what’s happening under the Rex’s feet. Sixty feet beneath him, it’s almost as if the ground is turning into quicksand. The Rex lets out another furious bellow and finally topples, brought down by its own massive bulk on the unsteady ground. Something cracks, loudly, and the earth opens even further. A long fissure appears in the gray volcanic rock, and at the bottom of it, Barnes sees a stream of brilliant red lava starting to rise. He doesn’t remember how it works exactly, but hasn’t he heard something before about earthquakes setting off volcanic eruptions?

 _“Now_ do you believe how bad my luck is, Grady?” he shouts, but if Grady replies, he doesn’t hear it—not that he can hear much of anything over the helicopter, the dinosaur’s roars, and the sliding, shaking rumble of an earthquake in progress.

The dinosaur has clearly decided that whatever is happening to it, it’s had enough. The moment it regains its footing, it turns tail and starts to run, stumbling at first and then moving faster, retreating into the jungle. Skye watches it go before she lowers her hand, and the vibrations taper off.

“I think you overdid it, Tremors,” Barnes hears the pilot say, and he makes the stupid mistake of looking down one more time to see that now more cracks are appearing in the earth. A burst of lava bubbles up to the surface of one and pops, spattering the rocks around it.

“I _hate_ this fucking island,” he says, through clenched teeth.

“We need to get closer,” Skye yells at the pilot, and leans back into the helicopter to throw down a rope ladder. Barnes tries hard to just keep breathing, to have patience—after all, they did come all this way to rescue his stupid ass; all he has to do is hold on for maybe another thirty seconds, while the pilot brings the bird close enough for him to grab the ladder, and this will all be over.

That’s the moment when Barnes’ leg, the one with the raptor claw wound he’s been running around on for a couple of days now and that he’s already fallen on and torn open and generally abused six ways from Sunday, decides to give out once and for all.

Barnes’ body slides as his foot goes out from under him, and he loses the second foothold as well. He pulls his good leg up, trying to brace himself, but his right hand is slipping—

“Bucky!” Skye shouts, and the helicopter sheers closer and Skye reaches out to him.

_“Bucky,” Steve screams, and holds out his hand, but the metal bar is shaking and it’s too far, too far, too far—_

“Grab my hand, Bucky!” Skye cries, and he reaches out, but now it’s just his left arm holding him and even the metal fingers are starting to slide. He feels her fingertips on his wrist, but even if she catches him, she’ll never be able to hold him, he’s too heavy and she’s too small, and he thinks _help me Steve help me help me help me,_ because that’s the closest thing he can remember to a prayer.

Then the rock under his metal fingers gives a sharp crack, and for the second time in his life, Bucky Barnes falls off a mountain.


	22. Monsters

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I’m sorry, dear readers; you've all been so nice, and I really should have warned you earlier that it’s going to be 0% dinosaur action sequences and 100% totally sappy feels from here on out.
> 
> Also, please don’t smoke. It’s not Bucky’s fault smoking was so common in the 1940s that they put cigarettes in K rations, but he’d be the first to tell you he’s a terrible role model.

_Austria, October 1943_

 

This is the best cigarette Bucky Barnes has ever had in his life.

He’s sitting with his back against the treads of a captured HYDRA tank, head thrown back, eyes closed against the warm late autumn sun. Steve—the new big, strong, healthy-looking Steve, who he should be having a harder time getting used to, but really, didn’t he always see Steve as bigger than the scrawny body he was stuck in?—keeps halting the march to give the former prisoners a rest and make sure nobody falls behind. And yeah, some of the guys are struggling, but it’s amazing how well most of them are doing now that they’ve got a reason to hope again.

It doesn’t exactly hurt that Steve’s new shine is rubbing off on him, thanks to the rumor going around that the U.S. Army sent the one and only Captain America into the HYDRA prison specifically to rescue the sarge. He keeps laughing and denying it, but everybody still wants to shake his hand, as if he got captured with the 107th just to get the rest of them rescued. The fact that somebody found a half-crushed pack of smokes and somebody else found matches and they gave him the first cigarette they lit says more about their feelings than any amount of words. All in all, right about now, Bucky’s life should feel pretty beautiful.

He’s been sitting here for a while now, wondering when he’s going to start enjoying it.

“So,” Steve says, dropping to the ground next to him, “you made me come all the way to Europe to pull your balls out of the fire.”

“Gracious, Steven. Language.” Bucky takes a long drag on the cigarette, closes his eyes, and lets the smoke trickle between his lips. It’s making him dizzy and jittery and a little nauseous and if Steve chooses this moment to go on one of his smoking-is-awful-for-you rants, Bucky will punch him in the face.“Just so you know, I had them right where I wanted them. I was all set to break their fists on my face.”

“Your head’s hard enough, that’s for sure.”

“Oh, you can talk, punk. I’m not the one who signed up to get experimented on because I was so desperate to join the Army.”

He waits for Steve to sass him right back, like always, but Steve doesn’t. It’s quiet for a minute, nothing but bird sounds in the woods around them, and then Steve’s breath does that hitching thing and Bucky thinks, _Aw, shit._

Steve has his knees pulled up to his chest and his head on his hands and no, no, he absolutely _cannot_ start bawling, not here, where anybody could wander over and see. Because yeah, sure, those scientists back home figured out how to make Steve big and fast and more idiotically noble than ever, but they didn’t make him an officer, no matter what insignia the brass pinned on his chest. The business with Schmidt in the weapons plant last night must have shaken him up a lot more than Bucky realized—hell, it shook Bucky up, and he’s still not convinced he didn’t hallucinate half of it—and after all that, Steve more than deserves a chance to break down like any other man.

But Steve _isn’t_ any other man, not anymore. He’s Captain America now, as ridiculous as that sounds, and he lost the privilege of showing weakness when they dressed him up like a flag and called him a hero. Right now, the battered, broken men of the 107 th are only keeping it together because the poor saps have a bad case of hero worship—and that’s exactly what they need to get them back to the Allied lines. If Steve’s bravado slips where they can see, if he stops being larger than life even for a minute, they’re going to lose faith, and then they’re going to lose discipline, and in enemy territory, that kind of thing can get you killed in about a minute flat.

“Hey,” Bucky says, frantically stalling for time while he tries to think of a way to fix this. “Hey, Steve, don’t do this to me right now. Don’t you know I’m sick and that means you have to be nice to me?”

It’s a standard call and response for them, although usually Bucky is on the receiving end of that line, and the only acceptable reply is _Then you better get well, ’cause I ain’t gettin’ nicer._ It’s supposed to be funny, but it falls flat; instead of responding in kind, Steve just looks at him bleakly and says, “You must hate me so much right now, Buck.”

What? How is this about him? “What the hell would I hate you for?”

“Being stupid without you.” Steve gives him an unconvincing smile. “Signing up to get turned into _this_. And then not even doing anything with it, just letting them put me in those stupid films where I pretended to be a hero while you were over here doing the real thing. No wonder I didn’t have the guts to tell you what I did.”

“Yeah, you left a couple things out of that letter where you said you got a job with the USO, huh?” Bucky shakes his head. “First off, Steve, I wouldn’t have told you not to do it.”

“Really?”

“Yeah, really. I’ve been waiting for the scientists to figure this out since we were little kids. Never bothered me that you were short and skinny, but you were sick all the time, and you hated when there were things you couldn’t do because of it. Did you really think I wouldn’t be glad you got what you wanted?” Steve looks dangerously close to choking up again at that, so Bucky does the only reasonable thing: he punches Steve, hard, on the shoulder. “I just would’ve told you to be the _second_ super-soldier, dummy! You could’ve let somebody else be the guinea pig.”

“I couldn’t, actually. There was no serum left after they finished with me, and the man who knew how to make it is dead. It might be years before they can do it again. If ever.”

“Oh.” Bucky mulls that over for a minute. “Well, it was still stupid, but if only one guy could get it, it’s a good thing for all of us that it was you.”

“Yeah, Peggy said that too, but I’m not so sure sometimes.”

Bucky raises an eyebrow. “Peggy?”

“I mean Miss Carter. _Agent_ Carter. She’s a… she works for the… never mind.”

Bucky brings the hand holding the cigarette up to his mouth to hide his smirk. That’s the fourth time today Steve’s mentioned a woman named Carter, and every time he’s blushed and stammered and clammed up immediately. He might as well paint his feelings about this dame on a billboard.

“So if you don’t hate me,” Steve says, with a sudden edge in his voice, “then when are you gonna tell me what’s really going on?”

Damn. Sometimes he forgets that Steve knows him as well as he knows Steve. “What do you mean?” he hedges.

“C’mon, Bucky. How long have we known each other? You’re never this quiet unless something’s really wrong. If it’s not about me, then why don’t you tell me what it is?”

 _Because it’s not the kind of problem you can punch in the face, Steve,_ Bucky wants to say. But he holds back, because Steve isn’t actually stupid. He thinks that getting Bucky talking will help, and nine times out of ten, he’d be right. This time, though… this time it’s different, because…

Because Bucky thinks maybe something inside him got broken in the prison at Kreischberg. And no, he doesn’t want to talk about it—not now, maybe not ever—but he knows the others have filled Steve in. He’s heard about bad food, bad water, bad air, days spent sweating in the factory and nights spent freezing in the cramped cells. He’s heard about the grinding hopelessness facing men who knew the brass would never send a rescue mission thirty miles into enemy territory; about how the prisoners were forced to build weapons that would be used against their own countrymen, and about how, if anybody dared to refuse, they took it out on the next guy down the line, or a friend, or one of the guys under his command—whoever they thought it would hurt him most to lose _._

And thanks to some of the guys who have big damn mouths, Steve has probably heard some stories about Bucky, too. About how he was working twice as hard as he had to in that factory, trying to help the guys who couldn’t make their quotas. About how he pushed himself until he got sick and then wouldn’t let anybody cover for him in turn, because Bucky Barnes is a great big hero. _Bullshit._ Bucky’s damn bleeding heart has been getting him in trouble his whole life. There’s nothing heroic about knowing you can’t live with it if one of your squad gets shot for not working fast enough, not when you could’ve slipped a few lousy bullet casings across the table. Besides, the harder he worked, the less time he had to think about things like home, and Steve, and how long his ma and his sisters would hold out hope before they changed the blue star in the front window to a gold one. And he’s no martyr; he pretended he wasn’t sick because he was scared, plain and simple _._ Steve’s parade of childhood ailments was bad enough, but ever since he watched Sarah Rogers slip away an inch at a time, he’s known that a slow death in a hospital bed scares him a lot more than catching a bullet. He’ll never tell anybody that when the guards finally came for him and dragged him off the factory floor, he thought they were taking him out to the prison yard to shoot him, and all he felt was relief.

When they gave him to Zola instead, Bucky figured it was about the worst thing that could happen to him. Now that idea seems positively naive. He’d thought, as far as he could think at all on that table, that the Nazis were looking for ways to cure sick German soldiers by experimenting on sick American prisoners. Thank God he didn’t know what Zola was really trying to do to him and the other men who couldn’t work and were therefore expendable. If he’d had any idea they were trying to turn him into some freak HYDRA killing machine like Johann Schmidt, he would’ve gone stark raving mad, no doubt about it.

But if the stuff Zola injected him with was going to burn him raw, then surely it would’ve done it by now. Instead, it seems like Zola’s serum saved his life. And if the Bucky Barnes who came out of Kreischberg is a quieter, grimmer guy than the one who went in, if he knows some things about evil now that he’d rather he didn’t… well, there’ll be time to sort it out once the war’s over. Steve would try to help him, but Steve’s always had more than enough troubles of his own, and it seems like they’ve only gotten worse now that he can beat up his own bullies. He doesn’t need to shoulder Bucky’s burdens, too.

“Jesus, Rogers,” he says, “I told you I’m fine. Can’t you let a guy smoke in peace?”

Steve isn’t buying it. “Look,” he says, “you’ve been through the mill, and all this walking can’t be doing you any favors. Maybe you should ride in one of the trucks for a while. Why don’t I talk to Morita and set it up?”

Well, this is going from bad to worse. Bucky’s seen that stubborn set to Steve’s jaw before; it means he’s got a problem in his sights and he’s going to fix it, come hell or high water. The thing about Steve is, he gets so caught up in the problem in front of him that he forgets about the big picture. _Sergeant_ Barnes, on the other hand, knows that in the Army, there’s a fine line between having friends and playing favorites. The men in the vehicles are the worst casualties from the prison, and none of them got a shot of Zola’s kill-or-cure juice. It’s going to look just great to the 107th if Morita has to go up to, say, that poor bastard Sousa, who’s probably going to lose his leg, and ask him to slide over and make some room because Captain America’s buddy is looking a little peaky. This is just more proof that Steve isn’t ready to lead anybody into a mess hall yet, much less into combat.

Steve starts to get up, and Bucky knows he has to come up with something fast. Sergeant may not be much of a rank, but there’s nobody else around here who’s qualified for this job, so it’s up to him to get it done by any means necessary.

“It’s not the walking, Steve,” he says, letting a tremor creep into his voice. “The truth is, I… I just can’t stop thinking about what happened in there.”

Steve drops to his knees and grips Bucky’s shoulder, over the collarbone, just like Bucky used to do to him back when a good stiff breeze would’ve knocked him over. “Hey,” he says, “if you want to talk about it…”

Bucky meets his eyes, then looks away. “I dunno, Steve. It got real rough a couple times. And you’ve got so much to worry about already, I don’t want to be a burden—”

“Bucky.” Steve looks at him with those big wet puppydog eyes. “You can tell me anything.”

Bucky coughs, then takes a deep, shaky breath. “There was this one thing they did, when they were trying to break us. It went on for days. I thought they’d never stop. They… Stevie, they…”

“What, Buck?”

“They made us watch newsreels of some idiot called Captain America running around in these stupid _tights_ —”

Steve’s face is such a beautiful mix of relief and righteous indignation that Bucky is going to treasure the memory of it for the rest of his days. He laughs so hard that pretty soon his face is the one with tears on it, and finally, _finally,_ Steve laughs too. “The _costume,”_ he says, falling back against the tank. “I _hate_ it.”

“C’mon, it’s not all bad.” Bucky can afford to be generous, seeing as he intends to hassle Steve about that getup for at least the next twenty years.

“Oh, it’s all bad,” Steve says resignedly. “But as long as you can crack wise about it, I guess you really are okay.”

“Course I’m okay, stupid. I’m always okay. Give me a couple days to kip in a real bed and eat some food that isn’t slop, and I’ll be back to normal.”

“Damn straight you will, because I’m going to make sure you rest and take care of yourself from now on, instead of running around trying to help other people.”

The hypocrisy is so blatant that Bucky doesn’t even bother to comment on it. “Or else what, you’ll knock me out and carry me back to Italy?”

Steve’s resolute expression hasn’t changed one bit since he got big enough to carry out his threats. “That’s exactly what I’ll do.”

“Goddammit, Steve.”

“Oh, and another thing. _This_ has gotta go.” Steve grabs the precious, smoldering remnant of the cigarette and, as Bucky yelps and dives for it, stomps it into the ground. “I can’t believe you just had pneumonia and you’re already smoking again. I swear, these things are gonna kill you.”

Five weeks. That was Bucky’s first smoke in almost _five weeks,_ and Steve, who made it through half a cigarette once before he threw up, coughed for an hour, and swore off smoking forever, has no idea what he’s done. “You _jerk,”_ he yells, as he lunges at Steve and catches him around the middle in a flying tackle.

Jesus Christ, Steve is solid muscle now. It’s only the element of surprise that lets Bucky knock him down—well, that and the fact that now it’s Steve who can’t stop laughing. Bucky guesses not too many people dare to roughhouse with Captain America. Still, they’re more evenly matched than he expected: Steve’s bigger and stronger, but Bucky actually knows some wrestling holds, and they’ve always been about equal in stubborn Brooklyn scrappiness. “Okay, okay, I surrender,” Bucky says, when Steve finally pins him to the ground in a decisive victory. And he did just have pneumonia, which is definitely the only reason it takes him so long to catch his breath after Steve gives him a hand up. “Oh, quit giving me that look, Rogers,” he wheezes. “We both know you’re gonna be the death of me, not the cigarettes.”

“Aw, Buck, you don’t know how much I missed you,” Steve says, and pulls him into a bear hug so tight it knocks all the air right back out of him again. And Bucky thinks:

 _This._ This is what you hold onto, to get you through the dark times. Because, yeah, terrible things are going to happen and some of them will leave their mark on you forever; and whether they wear their faces proudly like Schmidt or lurk in the shadows like Zola, the world is always going to be full of monsters. Sometimes they’ll even try to make you one of them. But you can’t let the bad things, however bad they are, steal away everything that’s good in your life. You have to keep going, keep fighting as long and as hard as you can. Because one day, out of nowhere, you might find yourself in that one perfect moment that makes up for everything you’ve been through up till now. And when your best friend shows up out of nowhere and drags you out into the sunshine, you might realize that looking out for him now means something a lot different now than it used to, but he still needs you to do it. Needs you almost as much, in fact, as you need him to remind you that there are still things in the world worth fighting for.

And maybe, if they can both hold onto a few perfect moments like this, then he and Steve might both be okay after all.


	23. Steve

Barnes wakes up in an actual bed, with a pounding headache and blurred vision, but alive, and apparently going to stay that way. Fitz is beside him, watching numbers blink on a monitor, and Coulson, May, and Skye are standing just outside a glass window. May looks a little beat up, with some bruises and one wrist in a splint, but otherwise, everybody seems to be fine. He raises the metal arm, the only part of his body that doesn’t hurt, and gives them all a little half-wave. “Oh, Auntie Em, I’ve had the strangest dream,” he says. “And _you_ were there, and _you_ were there, and _you_ were there.”

“Bucky!” Skye runs in and throws her arms around him—and it hurts like hell, since pretty much every part of him is scraped or bruised or aching, but damn, it’s been a while since he got a real hug. Which is a sad commentary on his life, but Skye is soft and warm and overall a pretty great choice to break that particular losing streak. “Are you okay?”

“Of course I’m not okay. I got mauled by a dinosaur and fell off a mountain, for shit’s sake.” He tries to sit up, but that turns out to be a bad plan and he abandons it. “What the hell happened back there? There was…” Something pushed him forward, he remembers. Something that felt like a shockwave from an explosion, exactly as if a grenade had gone off behind him. He was falling, and then something pushed him—no, it _threw_ him forward, toward the helicopter, and he felt Skye’s arms lock around him. “You caught me,” he says.  

“Yeah, I did, and then you passed out, which made it really easy to pull you into the helicopter. You almost dislocated both my shoulders, so, you know, thanks for that.”

Barnes shakes his head. She’s trying to distract him, but he knows something _really weird_ happened on that mountain. “And next you’re going to ask me to believe that was just a convenient earthquake that scared off the dinosaur, right?”

“Actually, there was some kind of localized volcanic activity that—”

“Don’t kid a kidder, Skye. Are you a superhero?”

Skye gives a rueful little laugh, but everyone else in the room is suspiciously quiet. “I… don’t think I’d say that exactly.”

“How does it work? Is your thing explosions, or what?”

“Vibrations,” she says, quietly. “I shook things up inside the volcano until it… sort of… burst outward. It works a little like a mutant ability, I guess. People like me, we’re called—we call ourselves—Inhumans.”

Barnes shakes his head. “Okay, Skye, don’t take this wrong, but there used to be a HYDRA bigshot called von Strucker who was real interested in people like you. There was a thing he said once that stuck with me. People with powers, he didn’t call them mutants or Inhumans or anything like that. He called them miracles. God knows I don’t agree with the guy on much, but he had one thing right. Skye, what you are is a fuckin’ miracle.”

Skye looks at him, starts to say something, stops, and then gets up, quickly, and leaves the room. “Hey, wait, I’m sorry,” he starts to say, but May puts her hand on his shoulder and shakes her head.

“She’s had a rough time getting used to the whole superpowers thing,” she says. “Trust me, what you said was good.”

“Oh. Good. So what else have I missed? Is Grady okay?”

“He’s fine. He’s with the evacuees from the park—there were some people he wanted to check on.”

“They’re still here? Why haven’t they gone home?”

“It’s been less than thirty-six hours since the pteranodons escaped,” Coulson says, which comes as a surprise to Barnes; it feels like weeks. “And there were twenty-four thousand people on Isla Nublar. It will take a few days to move them all out. Not to mention that ash from a previously dormant volcano on Isla Sorna is causing a few issues with local air travel.”

“Skye set off the whole volcano?”

 “Just a minor eruption. Although I imagine that anyone who goes back to that HYDRA lab will find that the damage has been surprisingly thorough.”

Good. Hopefully the surviving people and animals had the sense to run, but he can’t think of a better fate for any remaining frozen human-dinosaur hybrids than being buried under lava. “Hey, Phil,” he says, “you got a new hand.”

“Yes, Fitz just finished it a few hours ago. Look, it’s detachable.”

No fair. It’s cooler than his. “Fitz? Buddy? I’m gonna need an upgrade. You think you could build me something with a laser cannon?”

Coulson smiles. “Now that you’re awake, there’s something that you might be interested in seeing over at the evacuation headquarters, if you’re up to it.”

“Absolutely not,” Fitz says, before Barnes can reply. “Bobbi and I just sewed him back together and put three pints of blood into him. Not to mention massive dehydration, muscle fatigue, three cracked ribs, and I’m not even going to try to put a number on the contusions and abrasions—”

“He’s a super soldier, Fitz. I think we can leave the choice up to him.”

Damn. He wants to lie down and sleep for about two weeks, but now he’s curious about what Coulson thinks is important enough to spring him from Medical for. “Yeah, okay,” he says. “But first I think I need some food, and some painkillers, and I definitely need some new clo—” He looks down, then back up. “Was this your idea, Phil?”

Coulson’s expression remains neutral. “I have no idea what you’re talking about, Agent Barnes.”

Sure he doesn’t. Barnes wonders if they already had a Captain America T-shirt lying around, or if someone made a special shopping trip just for him. “You SHIELD people are a laugh riot, did you know that?” he says, pretending to be annoyed as hell.

The joke’s on them, though. Because, seriously, he looks great in it.

 

The evacuees from Jurassic World have been moved into a warehouse on the outskirts of Puerto Limón, with a sign over the door reading, “InGen: We Make Your Future.” Barnes, wearing a ball cap and a sweatshirt with a stegosaurus printed across the chest, sits in the wheelchair that Fitz insisted on putting him in and looks around, but he doesn’t see whatever it is that Coulson wanted him here for. He does spot Grady, speaking to a redheaded woman at the edge of a group of tired, shell-shocked-looking people. Before he can ask, Skye says, “I’ll get him for you,” and sets off through the crowd.

Barnes runs his hands through his hair, wishing he’d had time to clean up a little more. Then again, maybe the bedraggled look will work for him. How many chances will he ever have to play the “I just got mauled by a dinosaur” card? But just before Skye reaches them, Grady leans in and kisses the woman, and she enthusiastically returns it, a full-on Bogart-Bergman kiss, and Barnes knows that any opportunity he might’ve had there is gone forever.

_Jeez, Barnes. Fall off a train, get brainwashed for seventy years, get chased up a volcano by a dinosaur… when you miss your chance with a guy, you really go all out, don’t you?_

By the time Skye brings them over to him, Barnes has recovered his poise enough to admit that if he’d seen the woman first, he might’ve made a pass at her, too. She’s cute, but it’s more than that: she gives off a smart, efficient vibe that reminds him a little of Peggy Carter, right down to the brisk way she strides across the floor in mud-spattered pumps. It takes moxie to run around an island full of dinosaurs in shoes like that. Forget Ingrid Bergman, now Barnes is reminded of the thing they used to say about Ginger Rogers: that she did everything Fred Astaire could do, only backwards and in high heels. If Grady’s found a woman like that, Barnes doesn’t blame him for wanting to hang onto her.

“Claire,” says Grady, “I want you to meet Bucky Barnes. Bucky, this is Claire Dearing. She runs pretty much all of Jurassic World.”

“Ran, I think,” Claire says, ruefully. “After this mess, I don’t think I’m keeping my job.”

“Your evacuation plan kept a lot of people alive,” Grady tells her. “They can’t afford not to have you in charge. Besides, the SHIELD people gave you proof that Wu was behind most of it, right?”

“Oh, I have it, but he’s long gone by now. And even if we find him, I’m sure he’ll find some way to wiggle out of taking responsibility for any of it. People like him always do.”

Barnes and Grady look at each other, and Barnes says, “You didn’t tell her?”

“Tell me what?”

“Henry Wu is, sadly, no longer among the living,” says Barnes.

“A tragic loss,” Grady agrees.

“He gave his life that a dinosaur might eat.”

“May he rest in pieces.”

“Oh, that is not funny,” says Claire.

“It’s a little funny,” Barnes tells her, choking back a laugh.

“Dear Lord,” Claire says, “I’m surrounded.”

“Hey, Claire,” Barnes says, “what’s going to happen to the dinosaurs that are still on Isla Nublar?”

She looks surprised, then thoughtful. “I’m sure the park will be looking at a lot of lawsuits,” she says, “and maybe a couple of hearings, but the animals represent so much capital that it’s not in anybody’s interests to let them die—”

“Claire,” says Owen, reproachfully, at the same moment as Barnes says, “They’re not just _assets,_ you know, they’re alive, they feel things—”

“No, I know—that’s just how I pitched it to the Costa Rican government,” Claire explains. “The only way to get them to listen was to remind them how much revenue the park brings into the country. And they agreed to let me keep a skeleton crew on the island for feedings and veterinary care until the legal mess gets sorted out. With strict safety protocols, naturally.”

“Can I make a suggestion?” Barnes says. “There’s a girl named Alisha who works in the petting zoo. She’s smart, and she can make tough calls, and she loves the animals. You should put her in charge of your crew. She won’t let you down.”

“I’ll take that under advisement,” Claire promises. She’s looking at him a little funny, now. “Bucky… That’s an unusual name. Are you by any chance related to _the_ Bucky Barnes, the World War II hero?”

“Yeah, distant relative. I’m named after him,” Barnes says, making a mental note to use exactly that lie if the subject comes up again in the future.

“Wow,” Grady says, carefully looking at the ceiling instead of Barnes. “Not every day you meet someone who’s _related_ to Captain America.”

“Related to—no, Owen,” Claire says, as if she’s talking to a child, “Bucky Barnes was Captain America’s sidekick.”

“Sidekick?” says Barnes.

“Honestly, Owen, how do you not know that Steve Rogers is Captain America?”

“How do _you_ have every celebrity’s name memorized?”

“Sidekick,” Barnes repeats.

“He’s on the news all the time!”

“I don’t watch the news, I have a life!”

_“Sidekick.”_

“Oh, I’m sorry, I don’t mean any disrespect to your ancestor, Mr. Barnes,” Claire says, turning back to him. “I know he was a war hero in his own right. Didn’t he die saving Captain America’s life?”

“Something like that,” Barnes says, only partly mollified. “Let me guess, you did a report on the Howling Commandos in grade school?”

“Oh, no,” Claire says, smiling. “When I was a little girl, I had a Bucky bear.” Apparently she mistakes Barnes’ look of blatant horror for confusion, because she goes on, “Oh, they’re adorable. They’re these teddy bears with little blue jackets and black masks—”

“I know what they are. Uh, we should get going,” Barnes says to Skye, who’s making little strangled noises behind him. “Hey, Claire, take care of this guy for me. He owes me a beer.”

Claire smiles. “I plan to. And assuming I don’t lose my job, please call me if there’s ever anything I can do for you.”

Well, if the whole catching-bad-guys thing doesn’t work out, Barnes guesses he can think of worse jobs than working at the dinosaur petting zoo.

“Not one word, Skye. Not. One. Word,” he says, once she’s pushed the wheelchair out of earshot.

“About what, B.B.?”

“Yeah, that’s very cute, now could we please just… hey, what’s the deal over there?”

Banes has just noticed a flurry of activity near one of the warehouse doors. Two men have entered, surrounded by a small army of staff in uniforms that say _Stark Relief_. The crowd parts enough for him to see, and Barnes feels a shock go through him. One of the men is Tony Stark himself, in his full Iron Man getup, with his shiny red and gold helmet tucked under one arm. The other… the other is…

Well, even without the outfit and the shield, he’d know that big blonde dumbass anywhere.

Barnes has heard that the Avengers, Steve in particular, will sometimes visit hospitals and disaster sites when they’re not otherwise busy saving the world; where they can’t jump in and be useful to rescue efforts, they do little meet-the-public events and try to generally boost morale. It hadn’t occurred to him that the Jurassic World evacuation was the kind of thing that might get their attention.

Within seconds of their entrance, there’s a scrum of little kids around the two of them, and Steve wades right into it, naturally. Some of them shy away at first, but he kneels on the floor and gets down on their level. Barnes feels his throat constrict when a little girl hugs Steve around the waist and shows him a stuffed dinosaur, which he inspects seriously before patting its plush head and laughing.

_“Bucky,”_ Skye says, in a tone that implies she’s been talking to him for a while now and he hasn’t been hearing. “Hey. Bucky. I said, do you want to go over there?”

Barnes is drinking in the scene hungrily, wanting to be part of it more than anything. _Yes,_ he wants to tell her, _yes, yes, yes._ But just then, Stark, in his gleaming armor, walks back over to Steve and leans over the crowd of kids to tap him on the shoulder and say something, and just for a second—just for a heartbeat—Barnes sees Howard Stark in the face of his son.

“Get me out of here,” he says to Skye.

“What? Bucky, are you okay?”

_“Please,”_ he says, and she must see the despair in his eyes, because she doesn’t argue.

Nobody looks at the guy in the wheelchair with his gloved left hand over his face, and Barnes doesn’t even look up to see where Skye is taking him until he hears a door shut behind them, and they’re outside. He’s grateful when she doesn’t try to make him talk immediately, just puts her arms around his shoulders and squeezes. After a while, she says, “You really love him, don’t you?”

“What the hell kind of question is that? I died for him, Skye. To all intents and purposes, anyway. And he was willing to let me beat him to death on the off chance that he could get through to me. Maybe it isn’t what you’re thinking of, exactly, but him and me… I’m pretty sure _love_ doesn’t begin to cover it.”

“So go see him.”

He shakes his head. Steve isn’t the problem right now. “I killed Tony Stark’s parents, Skye.”

“But… if that’s true, then it wasn’t your fault.”

“No, but it was still me. I saw the video of the press conference he gave after Afghanistan, the one where he freaked out and shut down his company. The very first thing he said was about not getting to say goodbye to his dad. Brainwashed or not, I _did_ that. And there are other things I did that I’m still remembering. What if it turns out it I was the one who took the shot on that Humvee? What if I put that shrapnel in his chest? Steve would forgive me, but Stark never will.”

“Are you sure he’s the one who needs to forgive you? Or is it you who can’t forgive yourself?”

Jeez, that one _hurt._ But even if she’s right, he’s not wrong—this time, protecting Steve means staying away from him a little longer. “Hey,” he says, trying to put a brave face on it, “don’t get all perceptive on me. Don’t you know I’ve been tragically wounded by dinosaurs and that means you have to be nice to me?”

“Then it’s a good thing you heal fast, because I’m not very nice.”

He actually manages a laugh. “Maybe not, but I like you just fine, Дрожька.”

“Дрожька? What does that mean?”

She butchers the pronunciation, but Barnes doesn’t correct her; he’s too busy realizing, too late, that she might not appreciate either the idea of random Russian nicknames in general or the one he chose for her in particular. In the interests of honesty, he says, “I guess you’d translate it as ‘quake.’”

“Quake,” she says, thoughtfully. “That’s cool.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah.” She reaches down to squeeze his hand, and Barnes knows for sure that sitting in the sunshine with a friend is a thing that doesn’t get less great in seventy years.

“James!” says a new voice above him. “What happened to you? Are you okay?”

Barnes looks up. “Hey, Alisha. I’m fine. I got a little beat up, but it looks worse than it is.” Skye makes an irritated noise, but she has superpowers, so she doesn’t get to talk. “How about you?”

“Yeah, I’m fine too, except that the place I work kind of went boom. And I just heard the manager of the whole park wants to see me about something. I’d think I was getting fired, except I’m not important enough for her to fire personally. But before I go, I wanted to thank you again for saving us at the petting zoo.”

_Yeah, sure,_ Barnes thinks, _tell it to Tony Stark._ But then he thinks, _Wait._ “Could I ask you for a favor, then?”

“Of course, anything.”

“Did you happen to notice a big blonde guy wearing a stupid-looking red, white, and blue suit in the warehouse?”

“Did you really just ask me if I _happened to notice_ Captain America?”

“Right, dumb question. If I give you something for him, would you make sure he gets it? Ask Claire Dearing to deliver it if you have trouble getting close to him—you can tell her it’s from Grady’s friend and it’s important.”

“I guess so, sure.”

He doesn’t have anything to write on, or with, but somehow Skye finds him a battered Jurassic World postcard and a pen, and he scribbles a few words on the blank space and hands it to Alisha. She takes it, looks at it, says, “Really?”, and when he nods, says, “Okay, Team Stegosaurus, if you say so,” and goes on her way.

“I’m with her,” Skye says. “That’s what you want to say to somebody you haven’t talked to in seventy years?”

Barnes shrugs. “If I wrote something nice, he wouldn’t believe it was from me.”

“Okay, I guess you know what you’re doing. So what’s next, Bucky Barnes?”

“Now? I dunno. Stick around with you SHIELD people until I heal up, if you’ll have me.” He’s not sorry about the time he spent in solitude, pulling himself back together, because he needed that time, but he also can’t deny he’s come further in a week with friends than in all those months without them. “After that, I’ve got some more unfinished business with HYDRA.”

“You’d be safer if you stayed with us.”

“I know. But you wouldn’t.” Barnes can’t forget what Wu said— _now that they know you’re alive, they’ll never stop coming._ And there might be other override codes, other shutdowns, which will only get more dangerous when he’s back at full strength. “But you’re a hacker, so you can probably figure out a way for us to keep in touch, right? With the Twitters or the Snapchats or whatever it is the kids are doing these days?”

She laughs. “I’ll get you a burner phone and send you annoying texts full of emojis. It’ll be great.”

Yeah, he actually thinks it will be. Because the thing is, Barnes is pretty sure he’s never going to be completely not-broken again, but that doesn’t mean he can’t also be okay. He’s definitely not ready to be James Buchanan Barnes, Agent of SHIELD, and he’s not ready to go back to being Steve’s Bucky yet, either. But maybe he’s ready to be somebody else for a little while, somebody new.

Definitely somebody who’s punched a Nazi dinosaur, though. Because that was awesome.

The sudden rumble of a car engine startles him out of his thoughts, and he looks up to see a cherry-red Corvette pulling up. “Need a ride, Agent Barnes?” Coulson calls, from the driver’s seat.

The car only seats two, but when Barnes glances at Skye, she makes a shooing motion: _go already._ Barnes grins. “You gonna fly it, or just drive around on the ground like a sap?”

“I was thinking I might swing by Isla Nublar and see the place from the air.”

It’s been a hell of a week, but you can’t let the bad things steal away all the good things, and with that in mind, Barnes is damned if he’s missing his chance to ride over an island full of dinosaurs in a flying car. He gets up, carefully, and limps the couple of feet to the passenger door. “Are flying cars technically even legal?”

“There’s no point being the Director of SHIELD if you can’t bend the rules occasionally. And, Barnes? Don’t even think about putting your feet on the dash.”

“Sorry.” Barnes puts his boots on the floor mat, guiltily. “By the way, Phil, you might as well call me Bucky. All my friends do.”

From the expression on Coulson’s face, Barnes has clearly just made his life. Then the wheels rise, the car lifts off, and just for today, Bucky Barnes gets to be the good guy who rides off into the sunset.


	24. Epilogue: The Kind You Save

“Hey, Cap, you around?” Sam Wilson calls, stepping into the empty living room of Steve Rogers’ apartment.

“Come in, Sam. I’ll be out in a second,” Steve shouts back, from the back bedroom. Sam can hear the printer—the one he had to set up for Steve after Stark flatly refused to do any more ‘nonagenarian tech support’—humming as it spits out a sheet of paper. “Anything interesting happen while I was gone?”

“Not a thing. Not a damn thing. No fights, nothing got stolen, the new Avengers facility is perfectly secure, nothing of interest going on around here at all.” Sam is just praying that Romanoff gets tired of giving him shit about the whole Ant-Man thing before Steve comes back to the training facility. “How was Costa Rica?”

“It was fine,” Steve says. “It was really good, actually.”

“Did you just say ‘really good’? You just got back from helping clean up an island overrun by escaped dinosaurs and you’re telling me it was great family fun?”

“Not the part with catching the rogue Tyrannosaurus, obviously. But I’ll show you what I mean in a minute. Meanwhile, make yourself at home.”

“Okay. You have anything to drink in this dump?”

“There’s juice in the fridge. And use a glass,” Steve orders. “Don’t drink out of the carton.”

“Man, I never drank out of a carton in my entire life.” Sam goes into Steve’s kitchen and reaches for the refrigerator door handle. Then he stops, and stares. He pulls a battered postcard out from under a magnet and turns it over, examining it carefully. On one side is printed a photo of the big water dinosaur from Jurassic World, the one that eats the shark. On the other side is a single line, written in ballpoint pen in an old-fashioned hand that seems much more antiquated than Rogers’ own note-taking scrawl.

It reads, simply, _Nice outfit, punk. You should’ve kept the tights. –J.B.B._

When Steve emerges from the office, carrying a handful of printouts, Sam is still staring at that unlikely set of initials. “This _can’t_ be what I think it is.”

“Can’t it? Seems like you’re falling down on the private eye job since you took this Avengers gig, Sam.” He fans the printouts across the counter. “These are from Jurassic World’s security system. Turns out there isn’t much to do in the control room with no tourists around, so I got some people to help me look through the security tapes.”

Sam picks up the pages and fans through them, frowning. It’s a minor shock to finally see new images of a face that’s otherwise frozen in black and white photographs from the 1940s—if that even _is_ Barnes, and not just Steve’s wishful thinking. The height, build, and hair are all right, but the guy seems to have a gift for keeping his face at least partly turned away from any cameras in the vicinity. And the photos show a bizarre sequence that makes no sense at all to Sam: Barnes in a tactical vest and torn, possibly bloodstained clothing, entering a hotel while leaning heavily on a slender, dark-haired woman whose face is obscured; Barnes in tourist clothing, right hand in his pocket and left arm hidden in a sling, staring into one of the labs where they make the baby dinosaurs; and finally, Barnes in long sleeves and gloves, kneeling on top of some kind of structure and aiming a gun at the sky. “What the hell,” he says.

“He was firing on the escaped dinosaurs that were attacking people in the park. The girl who gave me that postcard? She told me that he was protecting her and some children who were nearby. He _broke cover_ to protect them, Sam. Do you see what this means?”

“How long was this before you got there?” is all Sam can think to ask.

“She said she spoke to him less than an hour before she found me,” Steve says, and the enthusiasm in his face is replaced, for a moment, with pain. “Less than an _hour,_ and the trail was already cold. If I’d just gotten there a little earlier, Sam.”

“If you had, he would’ve just run sooner. If you’re right about him, Steve—if he remembers, and he’s choosing not to reach out to you—it’s because he’s not ready.”

“He did reach out to me, though.”

“The postcard,” Sam says. “You really think that’s the first thing he’d say to you after seventy years?”

“It’s exactly what he’d say to me. It’s… hard to explain, Sam, but I think it’s his way of telling me he’s okay. And that he remembers. That’s the thing about Bucky. However bad it was, he never let anything keep him down for long.” Steve pauses. “You said, once, that you didn’t think he was the kind you save. Maybe you were more right than we knew. Maybe he’s saving himself.”

“I’ve told you before about getting your hopes up.”

“I know,” Steve sighs. “I know.” Then, in about the most blatant attempt to change the subject Sam has ever seen, he says, “What’s your favorite dinosaur, Sam?”

“Really? Adult human beings have ‘favorite dinosaurs’ in your world?”

“I do. Triceratops. When I was kid, they always painted it as the scrappy little guy that would take on a T. Rex and win. C’mon, what’s yours?”

“It’s not a thing I really think hard about.”

“Ten bucks says you like the pterodactyls.”

“You owe me ten bucks, then, because anybody with half a brain knows the best dinosaur is the brontosaurus,” says Sam, and considers the subject of Bucky Barnes tabled for the time being—not without a small measure of relief. He wants to think about those photos, maybe do a little digging of his own into what really happened in Jurassic World. Even when he does, though, he suspects that this one is going to remain an enigma.

Steve doesn’t bring up the subject again, either. But after Sam leaves, he sits down with his sketchbook and starts working on a drawing he’s been thinking about since the plane ride back from Jurassic World. The outline takes shape quickly: a humped reptile body with a small head, armored plates along the back, a tail tipped with spikes. A dinosaur that can take anything life throws its way and keep on going.

He’ll put it in the room he’s setting up for a long-term visitor to stay in. One of these days, in the not-too-distant future, Bucky is going to love it.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [The Tumblr post for this fic is [here](http://follow-the-sun-fanfic.tumblr.com/post/146675505040/assets-out-of-containment-chapter-1). Thanks for reading!]


End file.
